Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, a distinguished professor of public health and health policy in the CUNY School of Urban Public Health at Hunter College and a longtime advocate of a national health insurance program, will visit Battle Creek in April as the featured speaker for the Sherwood B. Winslow M.D. Distinguished Lectureship.
Dr. Woolhandler will present “Health Reform in the Trump Era: Moving Forward from the ACA to Single Payer” on Tuesday, April 23, 2019, at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. The medical school partners with the Battle Creek Community Foundation to sponsor the Winslow Lectureship twice each year.
Dr. Woolhandler is a practicing primary care physician, an adjunct clinical professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, a lecturer in medicine at Harvard Medical School where she co-directed the general internal medicine fellowship program and practiced primary care internal medicine at Cambridge Hospital. She has advocated for guaranteed access to health care for all members of society, including Americans currently without medical insurance.
In 1986, she helped found Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), a not-for-profit organization for physicians, medical students, and other health care professionals who advocate for a national health insurance program. Membership in PNHP now numbers about 10,000 physicians who support national non-profit health insurance.
Dr. Woolhandler was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1951 and earned her bachelor's degree at Stanford University in 1975. She graduated with her MD degree from Louisiana State University School of Medicine in 1979 and returned to the West Coast for her internship and residency at the University of California-San Francisco. Later, she earned her master's degree in public health at the University of California-Berkeley.
In 1983, Dr. Woolhandler moved to Massachusetts and began a medical residency at The Cambridge Hospital, where she served as the National Health Services Research Fellow in general internal medicine from 1986 to 1987. During this time, she credits Dr. Robert S. Lawrence, chief of medicine, with helping her develop a vision of how she could combine her social activism with a medical career.
Dr. Woolhandler has been a member of the Harvard faculty since 1987 and has conducted research and published her results in dozens of articles, chapters, and books, including “Bleeding the Patient: The Consequences of Corporate Health Care,” published in 2000.
Studying the inequalities in health and health care, administrative costs in medicine, and national health insurance, she promotes a national health program with a single payer system. Dr. Woolhandler has received numerous honors and awards for her contributions to health care. In 1990, she was the Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellow for the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences. In 1994, she received the Edward K. Barsky Award from the Physicians Forum and, in 1996, the Ethical Culture Society named her "Humanist of the Year."
The event on April 23 will begin at 6:00 p.m. with a reception and hors d’oeuvres at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, which is located at 1 Michigan Avenue East in Battle Creek. Dr. Woolhandler’s presentation will begin at 7:00 p.m.
The Sherwood B. Winslow M.D. Distinguished Lectureship was created through a special endowment from Norman Williamson, Jr., as a tribute to honor his longtime friend. Williamson is the grandson of W.K. Kellogg, founder of the Kellogg Company and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. The funds are used to hold the Sherwood B. Winslow M.D. Distinguished Lectureship. Each year since 1988, a well-respected speaker has been invited to Battle Creek to provide an insightful, thought-provoking lecture to physicians, allied health professionals, community members and family members of Dr. Sherwood B. Winslow.
Attendees can register for the event by visiting the Battle Creek Community Foundation website or by calling the foundation at 269.962.2181.