Former U.S. Cabinet official to discuss health care reform Sept. 27

Alice Rivlin

Alice Rivlin, founding director of the Congressional Budget Office, will discuss “Health Reform: Will We Ever Get it Right?” on Sept. 27 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The free public talk is at 5:30 p.m. in Gerrard Hall. Rivlin will deliver the Thomas Willis Lambeth Lecture in Public Policy in the College of Arts and Sciences. The endowed lecture series is named for the former executive director of the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation. It was endowed in 2006 to bring to campus distinguished speakers who are practitioners or scholars of public policy, particularly those whose work addresses education, ethics, democratic institutions and civic engagement.

Rivlin has served as director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, vice chair of the Federal Reserve board and assistant secretary for Health, Education and Welfare. In 2010, President Barack Obama appointed her to the Bowles-Simpson Commission on the reducing the federal deficit. She is now a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution and a visiting professor of public policy at Georgetown University.

Rivlin is the author of numerous articles and books, among them “Systematic Thinking for Social Action and Restoring the American Dream.” In 2008, she received the inaugural Daniel Patrick Moynihan Prize from the American Academy of Political and Social Science. She also has received a MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellowship, and she has taught at Harvard, George Mason and New School universities.