Inside Track LindA mALLon
front-row seats
TheRe aRe Many aDvanTaGeS FoR ThoSe oF US who claim Washington as our hometown. The
parks and public areas are beautiful, the museums are free (your tax dollars at work), and the weather, except
for a few brutal months in the summer, is generally forgiving. and then there’s the drama. not local stage
productions (although live performance in Washington continues to get better and better), but political the-
ater. When history is being made, we Washingtonians generally enjoy a front-row seat.
Services and other regulators have been tasked with resolving.
There are several ways for you to continue to keep close tabs
on this process. For the past half year, the Academy has been
sending regular blast e-mails to members highlighting health
reform activity. Special pages have been created on the Academy’s website with links to important documents and Academy
work products in the area of health reform ( www.actuary.org/
issues/ health_reform.asp).
If you haven’t been getting the blast e-mails, it might be because the Academy doesn’t have your e-mail address. That’s
easily fixed by going to the Academy’s members-only pages
( www.actuary.org/members/login.asp) and providing the information. It’s a handy way for the Academy to keep you up to
date on its activities and an even handier way for you to receive
pertinent and important information in a timely fashion.
No, it won’t be the same as living here in Washington (you
probably get better summers where you live, anyway). But
there’s a lot happening these days in the nation’s capital. Stay
in touch. We’ll be sure to save you a seat.
For the epic spectacle that was health care reform, Heather
Jerbi, the Academy’s senior health policy analyst, was so close
to the action that her front-row seat at times probably felt
more like the hot seat. Heather and Academy Senior Health
Fellow Cori Uccello worked tirelessly for the better part of
a year to assist members of the Academy’s Health Practice
Council in providing an actuarial perspective on aspects of
reform, track the progress of various proposals and amendments, answer policymaker queries, and perform numerous
other unheralded tasks.
It was an effort that on many days may have seemed to be,
at best, overwhelming, and, at worst, Sisyphean. But because of
the hard work of Academy work groups and committees (many
putting in long hours from beyond the Beltway) and Heather’s
and Cori’s diligent oversight here in D.C., the actuarial profession had (and continues to have) a voice in the process.
In her article on Page 20, Heather chronicles the months-long cliffhanger that consumed the nation, bringing to her
account the perspective of someone who not only witnessed
what was going on in the public eye but who also observed a
lot of the backstage action. We know how things turned out,
but it’s helpful to remember that there were many times over
the course of the past year when the ending was very much
in doubt. And regardless of how you feel about the passage of
health care reform, you have to admire the full dramatic panoply that it called forth: political pragmatism locked in an uneasy
dance with personal passion, shifting allegiances that formed,
splintered, and reformed, and walk-on players who threatened
to steal the whole show.
While Heather ends her account with the March passage of
the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the story is far
from over. The regulatory phase of health care reform is just
beginning to heat up, and Academy work groups already are
hard at work examining the new bill and identifying important questions that the U.S. Department of Health and Human
ShUTTeRSToCk / Bono ToM STUDIo
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