PROGRAM
PLEASE NOTE SPECIAL START TIME:
Live Zoom program begins at 4 PM EST
Roosevelt House is pleased to present a live Zoom discussion of The Ten Year War: Obamacare and the Unfinished Crusade for Universal Coverage by veteran journalist Jonathan Cohn. In this timely and essential volume, Cohn delivers the definitive account of the battle over the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. He will be in conversation with Hunter Professor of Economics Partha Deb.
Drawn from hundreds of hours of interviews, private diaries, emails, and memos, The Ten Year War offers a compelling and authoritative account of how the Affordable Care Act came to be, why it looks like it does, and what it has meant for average Americans. Taking readers to Capitol Hill and to town hall meetings, inside the West Wing and, eventually, into Trump Tower, Cohn offers an engrossing, behind-the-scenes look at the fraught history of one of the most sweeping and consequential pieces of legislation of the last half century. Named by theWashington Post “one of the nation’s leading experts on health policy,” Cohn brings vividly to life the struggle to reconcile pragmatism and idealism, self-interest and the public good, and ultimately two very different visions for what the country should look like.
As former Roosevelt House guest and author Robert Putnam put it: “With its original reporting and vivid storytelling, The Ten Year War is essential reading for everybody who wants to heal our sick health care system – and our sick political institutions too.”
Jonathan Cohn is a senior national correspondent at HuffPost and the author of Sick: The Untold Story of America’s Health Care Crisis–and the People Who Pay the Price, a finalist for the Robert F. Kennedy and Helen Bernstein book awards. A former senior editor at the New Republic and executive editor at the American Prospect, Cohn has written for such publications as the New York Times, Atlantic, and Self. He is a two-time winner of the Sidney Hillman Prize for journalism.
Partha Deb is Chair of the Hunter College Department of Economics, a Professor of Economics at the CUNY Graduate Center, and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Since 2012, he has been a Senior Advisor at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation. A specialist in health economics, his scholarship has appeared in journals including Health Affairs and The Stata Journal, and he has been a co-principal investigator on research grants from the National Cancer Institute and the Agency for Health Research and Quality. He is a faculty member of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Program.
Dear Friend of Roosevelt House:
Thank you for attending our public programs in such great numbers during these fraught eight months of lockdown and social distancing. Since March, when the pandemic first struck New York and the house closed its doors, we have welcomed more than 10,000 attendees to Roosevelt House Zoom events. Our priority has been, and remains, assembling the best thinkers and authors we can bring before you, in both new and encore programming, to help us both to remember past crises and challenges, and navigate the challenges of the current crisis. Even though we very much miss welcoming you to Roosevelt House in person, we pledge to you that, as long as we must, we will continue featuring opportunities for civic engagement online.
To fulfill these goals we look to you, more than ever, for your crucially needed financial support. We ask that you help us navigate these unprecedented times—and opportunities—by contributing to Roosevelt House so that our programming can continue robustly.
Many thanks—and thank you, as always, for your loyalty and generosity.
