An Inside View of Federal Health Policy Making: The Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellows

In 2007, I became the first RWJ health policy fellow to serve on the staff of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, chaired by the time by Rep. Henry A. Waxman. During my service, I helped the Committee's professional staff with several high profile investigations and hearings, including an hearing on the FDA's role in evaluating the safety of Avandia, another on the Health and Environmental Impacts of Uranium Contamination in the Navajo Nation, and most notably, an extensive investigation of efforts to politicize the work of the Surgeon General of the U.S. Public Health Service. The experience convinced me of the need for health professionals, including physicians, to be more actively engaged in the policy process. After returning to my prior academic position to manage a concerted effort to keep Atlanta's only public hospital from closing, I joined the RAND Corporation as the Paul O'Neill-Alcoa Chair in Policy Analysis and now serve as Director of RAND Health, one of the world's largest and most influential organizations devoted to objective health policy research.