Health Care Expert Shannon Brownlee Presents Johnson Lecture at W&L
Journalist and U.S. health care expert Shannon Brownlee will deliver the opening address of this year’s Johnson Lecture Series at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 29, in Stackhouse Theater.
Brownlee’s talk is titled “After Reform: How We Can Transform Medicine, Improve the Nation’s Health, and Avoid Going Broke.”
The presentation is free and open to the public.
A former Senior Research Fellow and Bernard L. Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation, Brownlee has written extensively about the rising costs and diminishing quality of health care in the United States, most recently in such publications as New Scientist, The Washington Monthly, Newsweek, Epoch Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Christian Science Monitor and the Washington Post. Her 2007 book Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Bloomsbury Press) was described by the New York Times as “the best description… of a huge economic problem that we know how to solve” and named best economics book of the year.
Brownlee earned her M.S. from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has won numerous awards, including the Association of Health Care Journalists Award for Excellence, the Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting and the National Association of Science Writers Science-in-Society Award.
In addition to her Tuesday night talk, Brownlee will meet with small groups of Washington and Lee students throughout the week and be a guest lecturer in several classes.
Brownlee will be the first of several public policy experts to discuss issues particularly salient to U.S. national interests at W&L this year as part of the Johnson Program’s “State of the Union” lecture series.
