A panel of experts on U.S. health care policy debates the prospects of health care reform and the future of the American health care system.

The event is co-sponsored by the Penn-Wharton Public Policy Initiative and the Adam Smith Society.

Panelists

Ezekiel J. Emanuel is the Vice Provost for Global Initiatives, the Diane v.S. Levy and Robert M. Levy University Professor, and Chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. Dr. Emanuel was the founding chair of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health and held that position until August of 2011. Until January 2011, he served as a Special Advisor on Health Policy to the Director of the Office of Management and Budget and National Economic Council. He is a breast oncologist and author.

Paul Howard is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and director of health policy. He is a contributor to The Apothecary, the Forbes blog on health-care policy and entitlement reform, and a regular columnist for The Morning Consult. Along with Peter Huber, he is the co-author of Unlocking Precision Medicine (Encounter Books, 2016). Howard has written on a wide variety of medical-policy issues, including FDA reform, biopharmaceutical innovation, consumer-driven health care, and Medicare and Medicaid reform. He is a member of MI’s Project FDA.

Howard was part of the health-care policy advisory group for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, has testified three times before Congress, and, during 2013–16, served on an expert panel as a judge for Celgene’s Innovation Impact Awards.

Stephanie J. Carlton, RN, MBA is currently an expert consultant at McKinsey & Company where she advises clients on Medicare Advantage, Medicaid, and the non-group insurance market. Previously, Ms. Carlton worked for a decade on Capitol Hill, leading work for the U.S. Senate Finance Committee on Medicare Advantage and Medicaid, as well as advising Senator John Cornyn (TX) and Senator Tom Coburn (OK) on health policy issues. As an expert on Medicare, Medicaid, and data transparency, Ms.Carlton has also spearheaded legislative efforts to increase the public availability of Medicare and Medicaid data. 

Allyson Y. Schwartz is the President and CEO of the Better Medicare Alliance. She is a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Pennsylvania who served from 2005-2015, is a nationally recognized leader on health care issues. Having worked as a health service executive, Schwartz was elected to the Pennsylvania State Senate in 1990, serving 14 years until her election to Congress. In the state Senate, Schwartz was the driving force behind Pennsylvania’s CHIP program, which was a model for the federal CHIP program five years later. Schwartz is a Distinguished Policy Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania's Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, Visiting Fellow at the Penn Wharton Public Policy Initiative, Senior Fellow for Health Policy at the Center for American Progress, and Co-Chair of the Bipartisan Policy Center Health and Housing Task Force.

Moderator

Daniel Polsky, PhD, is the Executive Director of the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, Professor of Medicine in the School of Medicine and a Professor of Health Care Management in the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He received a PhD in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania in May 1996 and a Master of Public Policy from the University of Michigan in 1989. His research areas include access to health care, economics of the physician workforce, and economic evaluation of medical and behavioral health interventions. His research was awarded AcademyHealth’s Article of the Year in 2014. He serves on the Congressional Budget Office’s Panel of Health Advisers and the Institute of Medicine Board on Population Health and Public Health Practice. He is an associate editor at Health Economics and serves on the editorial board of several journals including Health Services Research and Medical Care Research and Review. He was the Senior Economist on health issues at the President’s Council of Economic Advisers in 2007-08. He is a coauthor of the book “Economic Evaluation in Clinical Trials” recently published by Oxford University Press.