Peter R. Orszag, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, discusses actions taken by the Obama administration in light of the financial crisis and prospects for recovery.
Bio
R. Glenn Hubbard
Glenn Hubbard was named dean of Columbia Business School on July 1, 2004. A Columbia faculty member since 1988, he is also the Russell L. Carson Professor of Finance and Economics. As a faculty member at Columbia University's Graduate School
of Arts and Sciences, he is professor of economics.
Professor Hubbard received his BA and BS degrees summa cum laude from the University of Central Florida, where he received the National Society of Professional Engineers Award. He holds AM and PhD degrees in economics from Harvard University, where he received fellowships from the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
He has been a visiting professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and Harvard Business School, as well as the University of Chicago. Professor Hubbard also held the John M. Olin Fellowship at the National Bureau of Economic Research, at which he remains affiliated with research programs in monetary economics, public economics, corporate finance, and industrial organization.
Additionally, he is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington and a member of the International Advisory Board of the MBA Program of Ben-Gurion University.
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.
Uhm, the reason anyone can afford expensive healthcare, is because people who may never need it help to pay.
Doing it your way means that people who needs expensive cancer treatment can never hope to pay for it, while those who goes though life without a dent can live happily ignorant and indifferent to the people around them.
I know you Nozickian policies seems all fine and dandy to you, but only if you couldn't give a rat's ass about your fellow humans.
i think your perception of how a fair society works is somewhat naïve.
I can recommend reading Rawls' "A Theory of Justice" to get some understanding of the issue at hand.
It is surprising that such talent has poo pooed then ignored the leading practical proposal for cutting costs fast - that is to give patients control over their own health care dollars. Patients acting as customers, with a little useful information, will find where the system provides value and where it does not far faster than bureaucrats. In fact, anything else can be justifiably perceived as anti-democratic.
Outsourcing one's health care budgeting to insurance companies and Washington for all but the most expensive and rare conditions is bound to promote waste.
I assert that this round of health care reform is too timid. It not only does not even aspire to cut health care costs in half, it likely will increase, not reduce costs, both long-term and short-term.
And it will not appreciably broaden the availability of health care.
member. 
