PROGRAM

Please Join Roosevelt House & the Hunter College Department of Public Health
for a Live Online Public Program Via Zoom

Please join us for a virtual Roosevelt House event featuring two distinguished professors of public health, David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler, to discuss the reality of the Coronavirus pandemic for the American medical system.

This will include an examination of the factors that contributed to the medical system’s unreadiness, the burden on hospitals to treat an ever-growing number of affected people, as well as the shortcomings of the health care delivery system that have been revealed (or re-revealed), and what potential medical breakthroughs, if any, might exist on the horizon.

David U. Himmelstein M.D. is a Distinguished Professor of Public Health at Hunter College, a Roosevelt House Faculty Associate, and a Lecturer in Medicine at Harvard Medical School, where he was previously a Professor of Medicine. He also serves as a staff physician at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. He has authored or co-authored three books and more than 150 journal articles, including widely-cited proposals for single payer health care reform, studies of patient dumping, the high administrative costs of the U.S. health care system, medical bankruptcy (co-authored with Elizabeth Warren and Steffie Woolhandler), and the mortal consequences of uninsurance. He co-founded, with Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, Physicians for a National Health Program.

Steffie Woolhandler, M.D., MPH is a Distinguished Professor of Public Health at Hunter College, a member of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Faculty Curriculum Committee, a primary-care doctor in the South Bronx, and a Lecturer in Medicine at Harvard Medical School, where she was formerly Professor of Medicine. She has published more than 150 journal articles, reviews, chapters, and books on health policy and is a leading advocate of non-profit national health insurance. Among her influential scholarly articles are studies on patient dumping, medical bankruptcy, waste in hospitals and in medicine more generally, and the lethality of being uninsured.

Esteemed teachers, brilliant scholars, and front-line leaders in the field of public health, Professors Himmelstein and Woolhandler are known and admired nationally and around the world not only for their knowledge, research, and expertise, but also for their forceful activism for quality health care.

They will be in conversation with Professor of Public Health and Director of the bachelor’s degree program in Public Health, Philip Alcabes. Trained as an infectious-disease epidemiologist, Alcabes studied HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and other infections for many years. He now writes extensively about illness and health. He is the author of Dread: How Fear and Fantasy Fueled Epidemics from the Black Death to Avian Flu.

To all our Roosevelt House participants, visitors, and guests: we are grateful and comforted to know that you remain connected to the Hunter family during this difficult moment in history.  As we work to put our programming archive at your disposal, we are also aware that some Hunter students now face daunting challenges regarding lost jobs, diminished income, pending bills, and access to computers and software that will enable them to continue their semesters through Hunter online learning.  Please consider supporting Hunter students by making  gift to the Coronavirus Emergency Assistance Fund. Thank you. 

Click Here to Donate to the Coronavirus Emergency Assistance Fund.