Athens, Ga. – Henry J. Aaron, noted health care expert and economist at The Brookings Institution, will give the University of Georgia School of Public and International Affairs’ annual Getzen Lecture on Government Accountability April 3 at 3 p.m. in the Chapel. His lecture, titled “Health Reform: The Calm Between the Storms,” is free and open to the public.
Aaron is currently the Bruce and Virginia MacLaury Senior Fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution. He focuses on the reform of health care financing; public systems such as Medicare and Medicaid; Social Security; and tax and budget policy.
“The cost of health care is going to keep going up,” Aaron said in a January interview with “Nightly Business Report.” “It’s going to go up because we’re getting older, and as we get older we use more health care, and it’s going to go up because science keeps on producing wonderful new things that physicians and hospitals can do. And they cost money. What we can do is eliminate the needlessly expensive way in which we now provide health care.”
“Henry J. Aaron has been the mainstay of the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution for more than four decades,” said Thomas P. Lauth, dean of the School of Public and International Affairs. “His research on health care policy, and especially health care financing, is essential for any serious discussion of those subjects.
“At a time when implementation of the Affordable Care Act is high on our nation’s policy agenda, we are indeed fortunate to have Hank Aaron speak to the UGA and Athens communities,” Lauth said.
A graduate of the University California, Los Angeles and Harvard University, Aaron initially joined the Brookings staff in 1968. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the advisory committee of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and the visiting committee of the Harvard Medical School.
The Getzen Lecture is co-hosted by SPIA and the department of public administration and policy.
