The House and Senate and the president have all left town for the August recess. Just before they left they were deep in the drama of the Senate Republicans’ failure to repeal and/or replace Obamacare, otherwise known as the Affordable Care Act.
During this exodus of all politicians from Washington we’ll put politics aside for a moment and ask: What should the healthcare system and healthcare coverage in the U.S. look like? Can we take the system we’ve got and make it work better? And if we were starting from scratch, what kind of system would we create?
Two experts who have been thinking and writing about healthcare for years join Midday to answer these questions.
Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal is editor-in-chief of the non-profit Kaiser Health News. She was a reporter for the New York Times for 22 years, covering health and other subjects. While at The Times, she wrote a prize-winning, 10-part series about the high-cost of medical care called “Paying Till It Hurts.” She is the author of the book “An American Sickness: How Healthcare became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back.” Before she became a journalist, she was an emergency room physician.
Dr. Christy Ford Chapin is an associate professor of 20th century political history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins University and the author of the book, “Ensuring America’s Health: The Public Creation of the Corporate Health Care System.”
