As the longest serving U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services in history, Donna Shalala, now the President of the University of Miami, has devoted her career to improving health care.
By Lola Butcher
In 1993, President Bill Clinton appointed Donna Shalala as U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, and her eight-year tenure made her the longest serving HHS Secretary in history. More recently, Clinton's successor tapped her for another stint at healthcare leadership.
In response to reports of poor treatment of wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, President George W. Bush recruited Shalala in 2007 to co-chair the Commission on Care for Returning Wounded Warriors. The experience gave her another perspective into the problems in American health care.
“This was just one segment of the healthcare system, but I learned an important lesson: Single-payer doesn’t mean that the system won’t continue to be fragmented,” she says. “Veterans and the military have a single-payer system, yet it doesn’t guarantee seamless health care. Nor does it guarantee quality. Other elements have to be there.”
Shalala, who supports Sen. Hillary Clinton in the presidential race and “has been in conversation with” the senator’s health policy team, currently serves as president of the University of Miami. When she left the federal government in 2000, The Washington Post described her as “one of the most successful government managers of modern times,” and she could earn similar accolades for her academic leadership. A $1 billion fundraising campaign ended in 2007 with more than $1.3 billion in gifts.
Although the investigation of health care for returning soldiers was her first high-profile healthcare role since leaving Washington, Shalala has served on the board of UnitedHealth Group and currently serves as a trustee of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Her top priority for healthcare reform: universal access to quality health services.
“We’ve done everything we can do incrementally,” she says. “It’s now at the point where we’ve got to figure out a way to get everybody some kind of coverage. And I don’t know whether it has to be insurance. The most important thing is that people have access to quality health care.”
A scholar on the political economy of state and local governments, Shalala holds a PhD from The Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. She thinks the best ideas for transforming the healthcare system are likely to originate in individual states.
“Maybe Massachusetts and some of the other states, including California, that are struggling with this will teach us something,” she says. “Social Security, Medicare, children’s health reform, welfare reform—we built them off of state experimentation. We learned something from what people were trying to do on the ground.”
Shalala calls out many diverse constituents that must take responsibility for reform to happen.
“It depends on the large purchasers and the healthcare stakeholders, including the public that has insurance, the doctors and the hospitals, and the nurses and insurance companies and labor unions—everybody that has a stake in the system as it is now—and whether they’re prepared to take a step forward,” she says. “That will take leadership to bring them together, but not just presidential leadership. It will take Congress deciding that this time they want to do it, and they’re willing to do it together with the president.”