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PAST EVENT: BIOETHICS RETREAT 2010

Health Care Reform:
Justice, Law, Politics, and Economics

Saturday, May 15, 2010
Scheman Building, ISU Campus
9am - 3pm

The recent health care reform legislation sparked furious public debate. Speakers in this Bioethics Program Retreat will address different aspects of the recent health care reform legislation, addressing questions of justice, law, economics, politics, and public policy. What goals are served by the recent reforms? Is the US health system more just (or less just) as a result of these recent changes? Does the requirement that Americans purchase health care violate the constitution? What accounts for the public division-the anger and enthusiasm-that have accompanied passage of this bill?

Participants in the 2010 Bioethics Program Retreat addressed these and other issues associated with health care access and health care reform.

Click to view photos from the event

Our exciting schedule featured talks from:

Arnie Arnesen

"So Little Reform, So Much Anger! Whats a Government to Do?"

Arnie Arneson served in the New Hampshire House of Representatives for eight years, was the first woman candidate for State Governor in the New Hampshire, taught Political Science at New England College, directed the Wiss Institute for Public Policy Research, and has been a fellow at Harvards Kennedy School of Government and at the Harvard School for Public Health. She also holds a day job as a radio talk show host and is well known in central Iowa as the co-host, with Steffen Schmidt of the NPR radio show Talk Politics.

Norman Daniels

"Getting More Justice from Health Care Reform"

Norman Daniels is Mary Saltonstall Professor of Population Ethics, and Professor of Ethics and Population Health at Harvard School of Public Health. Daniels' work on the ethics and justice of health care access includes numerous books and papers including Just Health Care (Cambridge 1985), Seeking Fair Treatment: From the AIDS Epidemic to National Health Care Reform (Oxford 1995), Is Inequality Bad for our Health? (Beacon 2000), Benchmarks of Fairness for Health Care Reform (Oxford 1996), From Chance to Choice: Genetics and Justice (Cambridge 2000), Setting Limits Fairly (Oxford, 2002) and most recently Just Health: Meeting Health Needs Fairly (Cambridge 2008).

Mark Kende

"Constitutional Challenges and Implications of Health Care Reform"

Mark Kende is James Madison Chair in Constitutional Law, and Director of the Constitutional Law Center at Drake University Law School. He is also Co-Director of Drakes LL.M. program in Global Human Rights and Citizenship. His numerous and widely read papers on constitutional law and international civil rights have included discussions of internet speech and the death penalty as well as womens health issues. His work on comparative constitutional law recently culminated in a book, Constitutional Rights in Two Worlds: South Africa and the United States (Cambridge 2009). In recent months he has spoken widely on constitutional issues raised by recent Health Care Reform legislation.

Kendra Malone

"Womens Health: Justice and Politics in U.S. Health Care Reform"

Kendra Malone is an Anthropologist who works on international health care issues, with special attention to womens health and womens access to reproductive health services. She is presently active in the Iowa Coalition Against Sexual Assault (ICASA), and has also worked at the Emma Goldman Clinic for Women, and at Planned Parenthood in Ames. She is responsible for creation and editing of IowaCASA documents and brochures, and has made IowaCASA services more widely available by developing the program website. Her present research involves gender, sexuality, and disease transmission in Trinidad, focusing on womens disproportionate risk of HIV/AIDS.

David Surdam

"Ten Things to Know about Health Care Economics

David Surdam is an associate professor in the Department of Economic at the University of Northern Iowa. His research interests are wide ranging, and include issues in economic history and the economics of sport. He wrote his dissertation under Nobel-Prize winner Robert Fogel, on the Union Navys blockade of the confederate states, and currently writes on the economics of professional team sports. He has taught health care economics at Loyola University of Chicago, and at the University of Oregon, and has two forthcoming books.

Clark Wolf

Health Care Justice and Biotechnology: Patent Reform and Research Incentives

Clark Wolf is Director of Bioethics and Professor of Philosophy at Iowa State University, where he also serves as a faculty member in the Graduate Program in Sustainable Agriculture. Before coming to Iowa State, he taught for eleven years in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Georgia. He was visiting professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and at the University of Innsbuck in Austria. Many of Wolfs published papers are on issues of intergenerational justice, and he has written on the just distribution of health care between younger and older members of overlapping generations. In other published works he has focused on ethics and biotechnology, patent law, and technological change.