Health Reform’s Front Line

A total of 511 people are participating in the task force advising President Clinton and his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, on health care reform. The list, originally kept secret to prevent participants from coming under undue pressure from special interests, was officially released after it was leaked to the media. Here are a few of the more prominent members:

IRA C. MAGAZINER

Age: 45

Background: A Rhodes scholar and long-time friend of Clinton, is the day-to-day manager of the health care task force. It was Magaziner who, during the 1992 campaign, persuaded Bill Clinton to embrace the idea of managed competition. After the election, Magaziner set up the task force’s working groups and designed the rigorous review process known as “toll gates,” whereby proposals and ideas are subjected to intense questioning by other experts and senior Administration officials.

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WALTER ZELMAN

Age: 49

Background: As deputy to California Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi, Zelman, played a key role in development of the Garamendi plan to reform the state’s health care system. He is the former California executive director of Common Cause who quit that job in 1990 to mount an unsuccessful campaign to be state insurance commissioner. Before joining Garamendi’s staff, he nearly accepted the job of ethics chief for Los Angeles, but turned it down because of a salary dispute.

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DR. JOYCELYN ELDERS

Age: 57

Background: Designated as the next surgeon general, Elders, has headed the Arkansas Health Department for five years. Her decision to take on the Christian right by dispensing condoms in school clinics has earned her the reputation as a combative leader. As a pediatric endocrinologist, she has studied diabetes, thyroid problems and growth disorders in children and has published more than 150 scholarly research articles on those topics. The daughter of a sharecropper, she graduated in 1960 from the University of Arkansas College of Medicine.

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PAUL STARR

Age: 43

Background: A sociology professor at Princeton University, Starr, is also co-editor of the American Prospect. His most recent book, “The Logic of Health Care Reform,” has become a much-read primer on the issue. He received a Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1984 for an earlier work, “The Social Transformation of American Medicine.” He graduated from Columbia in 1970 and received a doctorate in sociology from Harvard in 1978.

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UWE E. REINHARDT

Age: 55

Background: Professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University. A prolific writer and speaker on the subject of health care, Reinhardt, 55, is also a member of the editorial boards of a number of health care publications. He was born in Osnabruck, West Germany, graduated from the University of Saskatchewan in 1964 and received a doctorate in economics from Yale in 1970.

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JUDITH FEDER

Age: 46

Background: Co-director of the Center for Health Policy Studies at Georgetown University School of Medicine and author of four books on heath care issues. She also is associate director of the Kaiser Commission on the Future of Medicaid and principal deputy assistant secretary for planning and evaluation at HHS. In 1989 and 1990, she was staff director of the Pepper Commission, a bipartisan group appointed by Congress that made recommendations for health care reform.

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ATUL GAWANDE

Age: 27

Background: Gawande dropped out of Harvard Medical School last year to join the Clinton campaign as a health adviser. He previously worked in Vice President Al Gore’s Senate office as a legislative aide and helped in the presidential campaign of former Sen. Gary Hart. A graduate of Stanford, he wrote a thesis as a Rhodes Scholar on South African race relations.

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LYNN ETHEREDGE

Age: 46

Background: A Washington health consultant and former director of the health staff at the Office of Management and Budget. Etheredge is widely known as one of the four principle architects of the “managed competition” model for health care delivery, which Clinton appears likely to borrow. He drafted the proposal along with Paul Ellwood and Alain Enthoven, leaders of the so-called Jackson Hole Group, which has been meeting for the past three years to discuss health reform.

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PHILIP R. LEE

Age: 68

Background: Newly chosen assistant secretary for health in the Clinton Administration, Lee held a similar position under President Lyndon B. Johnson more than two decades ago. He has been granted a leave of absence from the UC San Francisco, where he is director of the Institute for Health Policy Studies. He was chancellor of the UC San Francisco Medical School from 1969 to 1972, and was named by then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein as first president of the city’s health commission.

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DAVID H. NEXON

Age: 45

Background: Health staff director of the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee and senior health policy adviser to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.). A 1966 Harvard graduate with a doctorate from the University of Chicago, he served between 1977 and 1983 as a budget examiner at the Office of Management and Budget, with responsibility for the Health Care Financing Administration. In the early 1970s, he was an assistant political science professor at Claremont College in California.