Professor Enthoven is the inaugural speaker for the first Cooper Health Policy Lecture, being held Nov. 9 at 2:30 p.m. in the Hyatt Room of the Vanderbilt Law School. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Professor Enthoven, the Marriner S. Eccles professor of public and private management emeritus at the Stanford Business School, is considered the “father of managed competition.” He advocates a type of universal health care that relies on private companies, using market-based incentives that he believes reduces medical costs and increases economic accountability and quality of care.
Professor Enthoven was a consultant to the Department of Health and Human Services in the Carter administration, where he designed a plan for universal health insurance based on managed competition in the private sector. He provided the foundation for what became the Clinton administration’s proposed health care reform plan in the early 1990s and worked closely with Cooper in 1993 and 1994 during the debates about health care reform. He was also influential in the development of the market-based reforms to health care adopted when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister of Britain.
The annual lecture honors Rep. Cooper (D-TN) and is designed to bring a leading thinker on health policy issues to Vanderbilt and the Nashville community. It is also intended to recognize the important health policy contributions of the late Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs, Emeritus Dr. Roscoe (Ike) Robinson.
The lecture series is sponsored by the Vanderbilt Law School, Vanderbilt Institute for Public Policy Studies (VIPPS) and the Vanderbilt University Medical Center. The organizers of the lecture are Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs Dr. Harry Jacobson and University Professor James F. Blumstein, who has appointments at the law school and the medical school and serves as director of the Health Policy Center at VIPPS.
Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs Harry Jacobson, Vanderbilt Law School Dean Edward Rubin, Vanderbilt Medical School Dean Steven Gabbe and Dr. Robert Collins of the medical school in facilitated the new lecture series.