The program "New Leadership on Health Care: A Presidential Forum" was sponsored by the Center for American Progress Action Fund (CAPAF) and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).
Karen Tumulty moderates.
Bio
Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton
Hillary Rodham Clinton is the 67th United States Secretary of State, serving in the administration of President Barack Obama.
She was a United States Senator from New York from 2001 to 2009. As the wife of Bill Clinton, the 42nd President of the United States, she was the First Lady of the United States from 1993 to 2001. She was a leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in the 2008 election.
Senator Christopher J. Dodd
Christopher John Dodd (born May 27, 1944) is an American lawyer and politician from Willimantic, Connecticut. He is a member of the Democratic Party, served as U.S. Representative from Connecticut, and is currently a U.S. Senator from Connecticut. He has been the state's senior Senator since 1989 and is a candidate for the 2008 presidential election.
Senator John Edwards
Johnny Reid "John" Edwards (born June 10, 1953) was the Democratic nominee for Vice President in 2004, and a one-term U.S. Senator from North Carolina. On December 27, 2006, he announced his entry into the 2008 Presidential election.
Edwards was a trial lawyer before entering politics. He defeated incumbent Republican Lauch Faircloth in North Carolina's 1998 Senate election and during his six-year term sought the Democratic nomination in the 2004 presidential election.
He eventually became the Democratic candidate for Vice President, the running mate of presidential nominee Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts. After Edwards and Kerry lost the election to the incumbents George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, Edwards formed the One America Committee and was appointed director of the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Law. He was also a consultant for Fortress Investment Group LLC.
Representative Dennis Kucinich
Dennis Kucinich is an American politician of the Democratic party. He served as the 53rd mayor of Cleveland, Ohio from 1977 to 1979, a tumultuous term in which he survived a recall election and was successful in a battle against selling the municipal electric utility.
He today serves as the Representative (Member of Congress) for the 10th District of Ohio. It includes most of western Cleveland, as well as such suburbs as Parma and Cuyahoga Heights. He ran for President of the United States in 2004 and has announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for President in 2008. He is currently the chairman of the Domestic Policy Subcommittee of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
President Barack Obama
President Obama is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office, as well as the first president born in Hawaii. Obama previously served as the junior United States Senator from Illinois from January 2005 until he resigned after his election to the presidency in November 2008.
Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the president of the Harvard Law Review. He was a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law degree. He worked as a civil rights attorney in Chicago and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004.
Obama served three terms in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004. Following an unsuccessful bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000, he ran for United States Senate in 2004. During the campaign, several events brought him to national attention, such as his victory in the March 2004 Democratic primary election for the United States Senator from Illinois as well as his prime-time televised keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004. He won election to the U.S. Senate in November 2004.
Obama began his run for the presidency in February 2007. After a close campaign in the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primaries against Hillary Clinton, he won his party's nomination. In the 2008 general election, he defeated Republican nominee John McCain and was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009. Obama is the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate He and his wife, Michelle, are the proud parents of two daughters, Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7.
John Podesta
John Podesta is the president and CEO of the Center for American Progress and visiting professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center.
Podesta served as chief of staff to President William J. Clinton from October 1998 until January 2001 and was at that time responsible for directing, managing, and overseeing all policy development, daily operations, Congressional relations, and staff activities of the White House.
He coordinated the work of cabinet agencies with a particular emphasis on the development of federal budget and tax policy and served in the President's Cabinet and as a principal on the National Security Council.
Podesta has also held a number of positions on Capitol Hill, including counselor to Democratic Leader Senator Thomas A. Daschle; chief counsel for the Senate Agriculture Committee; chief minority counsel for the Senate Judiciary Subcommittees on Patents, Copyrights, and Trademarks Security and Terrorism and Regulatory Reform; and counsel on the Majority Staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Governor Bill Richardson
Governor Bill Richardson was elected governor of New Mexico in 2002 by the largest margin of any candidate since 1964.
Governor Richardson just completed his third legislative session, cutting taxes for more than 500,000 working New Mexicans, creating a statewide pre-kindergarten program, revamping the state's higher education system, and increasing access to quality health care. He was a candidate for the 2008 presidential election.
Karen Tumulty
Karen Tumulty is TIME's National Political Correspondent based out of Washington DC, where she covers national political developments for the magazine. Since assuming that position in 2001, Tumulty has written cover stories on topics that range from America's love-or-hate relationship with former President George Bush, to the role of religion in the 2004 campaign, to the unlikely ascendancy and dramatic fall of Howard Dean, to Arnold Schwarzenegger's bid for the governorship of California.
Previously, she was the magazine's White House Correspondent. In addition to appearing on Washington Week, Tumulty also makes frequent appearances on CNN, CNBC and CBS.
Branch of law dealing with various aspects of health care. Health law was traditionally known as legal medicine or forensic medicine and included primarily forensic pathology and forensic psychiatry, in which pathologists were asked to determine and testify to the cause of death in cases of suspected homicide or to aspects of various injuries involving crimes such as assault and rape. Today health law is applied not only to medicine but also to health care in general. Health law is especially important in cases with complicated ethical implications—for example, in the case of comatose patients who are kept alive by mechanical ventilation, when physicians and families are forced to decide whether or not it is more or less ethical to remove the ventilator. Other important aspects of health law include patients' rights and medical malpractice.
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