Krugman Speaks on Healthcare at DCC

Release Date March 21, 2007

World renowned economist and acclaimed New York Times columnist Dr. Paul Krugman will speak on the Future of Healthcare at Dutchess Community College on Thursday, March 29, at 7:00 p.m., in the James and Betty Hall Theatre, Dutchess Hall at the main campus in Poughkeepsie. Seemi Ahmad, Professor of Economics at Dutchess Community College, arranged Krugman’s appearance as part of the Handel Family Faculty Endowed Chair lecture series. His talk is sponsored by Worth Publishers, the Gillespie Forum, and the DCC Political Science Club. Admission is free. For information, contact Professor Ahmad at (845) 431-8517 or ahmad@sunydutchess.edu.

Krugman, Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University, is one of the world’s preeminent economists and an insightful, outspoken Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times. He is the author or editor of 20 books and more than 200 papers in professional journals and edited volumes. His most recent bestseller is The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century, a provocative analysis of the United States’ economic and political course.

Krugman was on the staff of Council of Economic Advisors from 1982-1983 when Ronald Reagan was president. He received the American Economic Association’s John Bates Clark medal for the best American economist under 40; was named America’s most important columnist by the Washington Monthly; and chosen as ‘columnist of the year’ by Editor and Publisher magazine. Krugman, who has a Ph.D. from MIT, also taught at Yale, MIT, UC Berkeley, the London School of Economics, and Stanford University before joining the faculty of Princeton in 2000.

No stranger to controversy, he has been an outspoken critic of the Bush administration, and has also sparred on national television with Bill O’Reilly.

At Dutchess, Krugman will talk about the current healthcare debate, which has its roots in FDR’s New Deal. “When the Social Security bill was being formulated,” writes historian David Kennedy. It reflected “the president’s (FDR) most unrestrained ambition, for a national system of health care. The political obstacles in the path of that… objective doomed it virtually from the outset.” In large part, notes Professor Ahmad, the political opposition to the proposal was led by the American Medical Association. President Truman proposed a plan for universal health care but failed, too, and President Clinton’s health care plan never got off the ground. “You can link FDR to whole idea of universal healthcare,” said Ahmad.

One of the charges of the Handel Family Endowed Faculty Chair, of which Professor Ahmad is a recipient this year, is to invite to the College people who can speak to the legacy of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. She wanted to bring an eminent economist like Krugman, especially because Krugman and his wife Robin Wells are the co-authors of the Macroeconomics textbook that she is using in her classes. “It would be a great opportunity for my students to meet a distinguished scholar and the author of their textbook,” added Professor Ahmad. The textbook is published by Worth Publishers, which helped arrange for Krugman’s visit. In his talk on Thursday, March 29, Krugman will discuss where the nation currently stands on healthcare and where it is going, comparing the costs and services received in the United States to that in other advanced countries.

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