Tuesday,
September 19,
2017Debate Between Paul Starr vs David GoldhillResolution:“The U.S. government should offer a Medicare-like plan that would be available to all Americans buying health insurance.”For the affirmative:Paul Starr is professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University and co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect magazine.He received both the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction and the Bancroft Prize in American History for The Social Transformation of American Medicine, originally published in 1982 but out in a new updated edition this year.Starr served as a senior adviser on health policy in the White House in the first year of the Clinton administration. Among his other books are The Logic of Health-Care Reform (1992) and Remedy and Reaction: The Peculiar American Struggle over Health Care Reform (2011 and 2013), as well as The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications and Freedom’s Power, a history of liberalism which earned the 2005 Goldsmith Book Prize.At Princeton he teaches in both the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs as well as the Sociology Department. He earned a BA from Columbia University and a PhD from Harvard University.For the negative:David Goldhill is president and CEO of GSN, which operates a US cable television network seen in 80 million homes and one of the world’s largest digital games companies. GSN is owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment and AT&T.Prior to joining GSN, Goldhill was chairman and CEO of Independent Network Holdings, Ltd. (INTH), which founded and operated the TV3 television network in Russia through its sale to the Interros Group in December of 2006. He also served as president and COO of Universal Television Group, a division of Universal Studios. In this capacity, he oversaw all operations at the company’s domestic and international cable television networks (including USA and SciFi), cable and network television studios, first-run syndication business and worldwide television distribution.Goldhill was also the CFO of Act III Communications, a privately-owned holding company with interests in television stations, movie theaters, magazines, and film/television production. He began his career as an investment banker with Morgan Stanley and Lehman Brothers.In 2009, Goldhill published a widely-acclaimed cover story in The Atlantic magazine entitled “How American Health Care Killed My Father.” In addition to numerous op-eds, he is the author of “Catastrophic Care: Why Everything We Think We Know about Health Care is Wrong” (Knopf, 2013) and “The Real Costs of American Health Care” (Vintage, 2016) and was co-editor of “New York’s Next Health Care Revolution” (Manhattan Institute, 2015). He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Leapfrog Group, an employer-sponsored organization dedicated to hospital safety and transparency.Goldhill graduated from Harvard University with a B.A. degree in history and holds a M.A. degree in history from New York University.