Jonathan B. Oberlander
        Associate Professor

    Jonathan Oberlander is a political scientist. His primary interests are in health politics and policy. This includes Medicare, health care reform, Medicaid and state-led reform, and medical care rationing. In Social Medicine, his teaching involves the first-year course Medicine and Society (which he co-directs) and a second-year selective seminar on health policy. He also teaches an undergraduate course on health politics in the Department of Political Science (where he holds an adjunct appointment).

In 2003, Dr. Oberlander published his first book, The Political Life of Medicare (University of Chicago Press). The book chronicles the political development of Medicare from 1965 to the present. It explores how Medicare operated within a political consensus about program philosophy during its first three decades and how that consensus unraveled in the context of debates about managed care, competition, and prescription drug coverage. Articles and opinion pieces by Oberlander have appeared in Health Affairs, Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, Canadian Medical Association Journal, International Journal of Health Services, The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. Recent articles have analyzed the implications of the new Medicare drug benefit and the political barriers to national health reform (reflected in this 2003 piece): http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/reprint/hlthaff.w3.391v1.pdf

Dr. Oberlander is currently working on two major projects. The first, funded by the Greenwall Foundation as part of their Faculty Scholars Program in Bioethics, examines the development of the Oregon Health Plan and its system of explicit medical care rationing, as well as the implications of the Oregon experience for state health reform. A second project, funded by The Century Foundation, is a book manuscript that critically examines market-based strategies for Medicare reform. Oberlander is also a co-editor of the forthcoming 2nd edition of the Social Medicine Reader, to be published as a 3-volume set by Duke University Press in 2005.

Greenwall Foundation: http://www.greenwall.org/

The Century Foundation: http://www.tcf.org

Curriculum Vitae

You may contact Dr. Oberlander by email: oberland@med.unc.edu; by phone at: (919) 962-1136; or by post at: CB #7240, Department of Social Medicine / University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill / Chapel Hill, NC 27599-7240.

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