Global Health at Princeton

On Tuesday, Oct. 2nd, 2012, at 4:30pm there will be a film screening and panel discussion of the documentary film Money and Medicine.  The event will take place in Dodds Auditorium, Robertson Hall. A reception immediately following the screening and discussion will be held in Shultz Dining Room, Robertson Hall.

The panel discussion will feature:
- Roger Weisberg, Producer, Director, Writer
- Uwe Reinhardt, James Madison Professor of Political Economy, Princeton University
- Tsung-Mei Cheng, Health Policy Research Analyst, Princeton University

With remarkable candor and poignancy, Money and Medicine captures the painful end-of-life treatment choices made by patients and their families, ranging from very aggressive interventions in the ICU to palliative care at home. The film also investigates the controversy surrounding diagnostic testing and screening as well as the shocking treatment variations among patients receiving a variety of elective procedures. Just as the national debate over health care cost containment and deficit reduction heats up, these intimate patient portraits put a human face on the crisis facing American medicine.

This event is sponsored by the Center for Health and Wellbeing's Program in U.S. Health Policy.

Roger Weisberg is a producer, director and writer. He founded Public Policy Productions in 1982. After four years as a staff producer for New York public television station Thirteen/WNET, Weisberg launched this independent production company to extend the reach and impact of his documentary productions.

Since he founded Public Policy Productions, Roger Weisberg has produced thirty-one documentaries on subjects ranging from health care, aging, and the environment to defense policy, child welfare, teen pregnancy, and criminal justice. All documentaries from Public Policy Productions have aired in prime time on PBS in the U.S., and many played on foreign television networks around the world. All were extensively distributed in the home video market and educational market worldwide.

Weisberg's documentaries have won over one hundred awards including Peabody, Emmy, and duPont-Columbia awards. Some of these productions were verite style documentaries with no narration. Others are hosted and narrated by prominent actors including Meryl Streep, Helen Hayes, and James Earl Jones, as well as distinguished journalists including Marvin Kalb, Jane Pauley, and Walter Cronkite. Weisberg's 1993 documentary, ROAD SCHOLAR, and his 2000 documentary, SOUND AND FURY, had broad theatrical releases before airing on PBS. Weisberg received an Academy Award nomination in 2000 for SOUND AND FURY and in 2003 for WHY CAN'T WE BE A FAMILY AGAIN? His most recent productions are NO TOMORROW, a chilling personal story that takes viewers inside a suspenseful death penalty trial and CRITICAL CONDITION, a cinema verite portrait of a diverse group of patients battling critical illness without insurance. Recently, Weisberg released MONEY AND MEDICINE, an investigation of the health care cost crisis that is bankrupting American.

Uwe Reinhardt is the James Madison Professor of Political Economy at Princeton University. Recognized as one of the nation's leading authorities on health care economics, Reinhardt has been a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences since 1978. He is a past president of the Association of Health Services Research. From 1986 to 1995 he served as a commissioner on the Physician Payment Review Committee, established in 1986 by Congress to advise it on issues related to the payment of physicians. He is a senior associate of the Judge Institute for Management of Cambridge University, UK, and a trustee of Duke University, and the Duke University Health System. Reinhardt is or was a member of numerous editorial boards, among them the Journal of Health Economics, the Milbank Memorial Quarterly, Health Affairs, the New England Journal of Medicine, and the Journal of the American Medical Association. Ph.D. Yale University.

Tsung-Mei Cheng is a Health Policy Research Analyst at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. She is an expert on comparative health systems with an emphasis on Asian countries. Cheng writes and lectures internationally on topics ranging from single payer systems, health systems change, health care technology assessment and comparative effectiveness research, health care quality, financing, pay for performance focusing on East Asian health systems, to the impact of the WTO and GATS on national health policy. She is the co-founder of the Princeton Conference, an annual national conference on health policy that brings together the U.S. Congress, government, and the research community on issues affecting health care and health policy in the United States.