Easing the Burden: Does Health Care Cost Too Much and How Do We Pay for It? A panel at the 2007 Aspen Health Forum with discussants Dan Crippen, Peter Orszag, Ezekiel Emanuel and Bill Frist.
Health care spending continues to rise even as policymakers, government officials and business leaders debate the best ways to control costs and extend coverage to those without it. Adopting healthy lifestyles is part of the equation, but the question remains: How can we pay for all of the medicine we want? We consider options that will help us avoid the most expensive approach: inaction- Aspen Institute
Bio
Dan Crippen
Dan Crippen, an economist and health policy expert, is a Former Director of the Congressional Budget Office. He also served in senior positions in the White House and Senate, including as Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy during the Reagan administration, and is a specialist in issues relating to the federal budget, health care and retirement.
In 2003, after four years of leadership at the Congressional Budget Office, Dr. Crippen stepped down and became a consultant for healthcare providers, including developers of cardiac devices and bio-engineered pharmaceuticals. He serves on several boards of companies in the health care industry as well as on the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and the CBO Panel of Economic Advisors. In addition, Dr. Crippen chairs the Quadrennial Social Security Technical Advisory Panel, reviewing the work of Social Security actuaries. He received his master's and PhD from Ohio State University.
Ezekiel J. Emanuel
Ezekiel Emanuel earned his PhD and MD degrees from Harvard University, where his doctoral dissertation received the Toppan Award for the finest political science dissertation of the year. After earning his MD PhD, he was a Fellow in the Program in Ethics and the Professions at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
Dr. Emanuel completed an internship and residency in Internal Medicine at Boston's Beth Israel Hospital and an Oncology Fellowship at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and then joined the faculty at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Before accepting his current position as the Chair of the Department of Clinical Bioethics at the Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health in 1998, Dr. Emanuel was an associate professor at Harvard Medical School.
Widely published on the ethics of clinical research, advance care directives, end-of-life issues, euthanasia, the ethics of managed care, and the physician-patient relationship, Dr. Emanuel's articles have appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, Journal of American Medical Association, and many other medical and ethics journals. His book, The Ends of Human Life, has been widely praised and received the Rosenhaupt Memorial Book Award by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation.
Dr. Emanuel served on the ethics section of former President Clinton's Health Task Force, the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, and the International Advisory Board on Bioethics of the Pan American Health Organization. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, UCLA, and Brin Professor at Johns Hopkins Medical School. He is an oncologist.
William H. Frist
Senator Bill Frist, heart and lung transplant surgeon and former Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate, is the Distinguished Schultz Visiting Professor of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. He is focused on domestic health reform, the basic science of heart transplantation, global health policy, health care disparities, information technology, medical mission work in Sudan, genocide in Darfur, the health of the mountain gorilla, and HIV.
He graduated from Princeton majoring in health policy at the Woodrow Wilson School and Harvard Medical School, completing surgical residency at Massachusetts General Hospital and heart transplantation fellowship at Stanford. He is board certified in general surgery and heart and lung surgery. He has performed over 150 heart and lung transplants, has authored 100 peer-reviewed medical articles, over 400 newspaper articles, and 5 books (on bioterrorism, transplantation). His board service includes Save the Children, Committee on Conscience (U.S. Holocaust Museum), Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, CSIS.
Peter Orszag
Peter Orszag is Director of the Office of Management and Budget. Orszag served as the Director of the Congressional Budget Office from January 2007 to December 2008, overseeing the agency's work in providing objective, nonpartisan, and timely analyses of economic and budgetary issues -- supervising the numerous analytical papers and cost estimates that the agency produces and, to present the results, frequently testifying before the Congress. Under his leadership, the agency significantly expanded its focus on areas such as health care and climate change.
In previous government service, Orszag served as Special Assistant to the President for Economic Policy and as a staff economist and then Senior Advisor and Senior Economist at the President's Council of Economic Advisers. Orszag was the Joseph A. Pechman Senior Fellow and Deputy Director of Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution. While at Brookings, he also served as Director of The Hamilton Project; Director of the Retirement Security Project; and Co-Director of the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture with the Urban Institute.
Orszag graduated summa cum laude in economics from Princeton University and obtained a Ph.D. in economics from the London School of Economics, which he attended as a Marshall scholar.
He has coauthored or coedited a number of books, including Protecting the Homeland 2006/7 (2006), Aging Gracefully: Ideas to Improve Retirement Security in America (2006), Saving Social Security: A Balanced Approach (2004), and American Economic Policy in the 1990s (2002). Dr. Orszag is a member of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academies of Sciences.
Ron Winslow
Ron Winslow is Deputy Editor of Health and Science and a senior medical and health care writer for The Wall Street Journal. In the past 16 years, he has written about 1,100 articles describing new medical and health care research and chronicling the economic forces transforming the nation's health care system.
He received the Howard Lewis Award for career achievement from the American Heart Association in 2003 and his work has been honored by the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill and other groups. He is a member of the National Association of Science Writers, and was a founding board member of the Association of Health Care Journalists.
member. 
