Shannon Brownlee

A View on U.S. Health Care Issues

Posted on October 23, 2009 - Permalink
Audiences: Alumni Current Students Faculty and Staff HomePage Parents and Visitors Prospective Students Research Trustees

Shannon Brownlee, acclaimed journalist and an expert on the country's health care reform, delivered her talk, "Overtreated: The Broken Economics of U.S. Health Care," last night in the Horace Mann Auditorium. She is the latest lecturer in the president's Distinguished Speaker Series.

In her speech, delivered to around 150 campus and town community members, Ms. Brownlee argued that the U.S. health care system promotes costly and unnecessary medical treatments, including certain medications and high-tech procedures, which do little to improve a patient's health. Those treatments, she said, are needlessly spiking health care costs for all Americans. Thus, she argued that the U.S. is in need of some form of health care reform.

"It's the terrible paradox of our health care system: we think we do not get enough care, but we actually receive too much," she said, adding, "and more spending [for excess care] has not produced better outcomes for patients."

She said that while the U.S. has some of the world's best doctors, medications and medical procedures, the country sometimes "fails to deliver needed care for patients."

To support her argument, she provided evidence of some unnecessary spending and procedures issued at hospitals nationwide.

Ms. Brownlee has written for The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times and TIME magazines. As a Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, a non-partisan think tank, she gives talks to the general public and government agencies on health care policy and the pharmaceutical industry. She has lectured at major universities, including the NYU School of Journalism, and at conferences, including The Nobel Laureates symposium. (Story and photo by Rob Matheson, Institutional Communications)