American Prospect Editor to Lecture on Ethical Arguments of Health Care Reform at Holy Cross

WORCESTER, Mass. – Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Bancroft Prize-winning historian Paul Starr will give a lecture titled “Moralities in Conflict: How Health Care Became So Hard a Problem for America” on Tuesday, Feb. 22 at 4 p.m. in the Rehm Library at the College of the Holy Cross. The lecture, which is co-sponsored by the College’s Health Professions Program and the Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture, is free and open to the public.

In the lecture, Starr will consider why Americans have for a long time fought so bitterly over health care, while other wealthy western democracies have not been sharply divided on the issue. Starr will also address the ethical implications of delaying reform or not carrying it out.

Starr is professor of sociology and public affairs, and Stuart Professor of Communications and Public Affairs, at Princeton University. He is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, a liberal magazine about politics, policy and ideas.

Starr has written extensively on American society, politics, and both domestic and foreign policy. He received the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction and Bancroft Prize in American History for The Social Transformation of American Medicine (Basic Books, 1982). His 2004 title, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications (Basic Books) won a Goldsmith Book Prize.

The Logic of Health-Care Reform, a short book by Starr in 1992 (and revised and reissued in 1994), laid out the case for a system of universal health insurance and managed competition. During 1993, Starr served as a senior advisor at the White House in the formulation of the Clinton health plan.

To learn more about this program and other Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture events, and to listen to audio recordings of lectures online, visit holycross.edu/crec.