Health Care as the New Social Security

Diane Auer Jones is a scientist with a long and distinguished record of public service. She graduated summa cum laude from Salisbury University and earned a Masters degree in biology with a minor in chemistry from the University of Maryland Baltimore County.

Ms. Jones has held positions with the government, both as a career civil servant and as a political appointee. She has served as a program officer with the National Science Foundation. She has worked on the Hill as a professional staff member for the Research Subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science. From 2003 to 2005, she served as Princeton University’s Director of Government Affairs, but then was called back to public service as Deputy to the Associate Director for Science in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Later, she was nominated to be Assistant Secretary for Postsecondary Education and was confirmed by the Senate on August 1, 2007.

Currently, she is the president and CEO of the Washington Campus, “a non-profit organization dedicated to educating current and future business leaders about the federal policy-making process, the impact of policy decisions on business strategy and success, and the ways in which business and community leaders can effectively and ethically influence policy decisions to support healthy communities and a robust national and global economy.”

Ms. Jones is one of the most interesting people you will ever meet. Through The Chronicle of Higher Education, she maintains a fascinating blog. There, she has written about living with her husband on an old boat that is moored on a city-owned dock in Washington harbor.

Here, she has written extensively and very movingly about child-rearing and home-schooling.

And she has written very thoughtfully about how health care reform, should it come to pass, could prove to be another government Ponzi scheme. That will be the subject of her presentation at our next policy salon, scheduled for Tuesday, February 23, at 6:30 in our WISH classroom at 239 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.

To prepare, the Glenn Fellows are reading a 2007 Congressional Research Service comparative study of health care spending in some thirty OECD countries.

They also will have read Atul Gawande’s oft-quoted article from the January 26, 2009, issue of The New Yorker.

Readers who are really interested in this subject might also want to look at this piece, by Jerome Groopman in The New York Review of Books.