Inside National Health Reform, the new book by John E. McDonough, received a favorable review in this month’s New York Review of Books, in the article Obama & Health Care: The Straight Story by Jeff Madrick.  John McDonough was working on the book when he was a Joan H. Tisch Distinguished Fellow in Public Health here at Roosevelt House in 2010.  During his time at Roosevelt House, Dr. McDonough taught a graduate course on the politics and policy of health care reform, and lead an interdisciplinary faculty seminar dealing with current public health issues, which culminated in a conference entitled, “National Health Reform and Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health and Health Care.”  Among other accomplishments, he organized and led a Brown Bag lunch discussion in conjunction with the Hunter College chapter of Roosevelt Institute Campus Network on national health care reform, co-convened a Food Policy Summit with Dr. Nick Freudenberg to discuss New York City’s past, present and future food systems, and led the Joan H. Tisch Public Health Forums.

From Jeff Madrick’s review:

“In view of the nasty polarization of current politics and the long history of reform, it is naive and even churlish simple to dismiss the ACA as inadequate. It is a comprehensive plan, a first in many ways, and one that can be built upon. John McDonough, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, was an adviser to Senator Kennedy and provides a firsthand account of the battle for and against the ACA in his admirably clear and terse book, Inside National Health Reform. He provides the best explanation available, which occupies most of his book, of the many individual components of the ten titles of the final act. As he writes, the ACA is “a landmark law in the history of health and social welfare…whether one regards the law as monumentally good or monumentally bad. Few federal laws in history approach it in terms of scope, breadth and ambition.” He does not exaggerate.”

Read more at New York Review of Books

Get the book:

Inside National Health Reform
by John E. McDonough
University of California Press/Milbank, 339 pp., $34.95