Experts in the News | Miller Center

'Hospital City, Health Care Nation'

Join the co-chairs of the Miller Center’s Health Care Policy Project to discuss a new assessment of the U.S. health care system that focuses on American hospitals—their politics, their financing, and the complex relationships that exist with the local communities in which they are embedded. Guian McKee's latest book, Hospital City, Health Care Nation: Race, Capital, and the Costs of American Health Care, recasts the story of the U.S. health care system by focusing on urban hospitals and academic medical centers to argue that such institutions have become vital, if often problematic, economic anchors for communities.

Margaret Riley

'Hospital City, Health Care Nation'

Guian McKee

A Maryland experiment shows a better way to reduce health care spending

With a fight over the federal debt limit looming in Washington, President Biden and Republican leaders have been sparring over possible cuts to Medicare and Medicaid. Together, the two health programs constitute the largest share of the federal budget, but as the partisan back-and-forth has shown, slashing benefits is probably politically impossible. It is also not the best way to address health care budget challenges. Instead of simply cutting, Congress should reshape how health providers, and especially hospitals, are paid. An ongoing experiment in Maryland shows how this can be done.

Guian McKee

Biden Challenged by Softening Public Support for Arming Ukraine

Philip D. Zelikow, a University of Virginia scholar and former State Department counselor, said military aid was more popular than economic aid because much of it is actually spent on arms produced by American defense firms. But he said that economic aid was critical to rebuilding Ukraine, and he argued that seizing $300 billion in Russian assets in the West for reconstruction would ease the burden on the American taxpayer. “I’m critical of the administration because it did not start moving at least six months ago to design a more sustainable and hopeful strategy on what will likely be the decisive battlefield of the war,” he said.

Philip Zelikow

TikTok faces bans in US and other countries. Here's why.

Such concerns focus both on potential risks posed to U.S. national security, as well as business advantages afforded to Chinese companies that may gain access to the information, Aynne Kokas, professor of media studies and the director of the East Asia Center at the University of Virginia, told ABC News. "There are significant national security concerns about Chinese firms that are gathering data in the U.S. and what they can do with that," Kokas said. "TikTok has a lot of users."

Aynne Kokas

John Owen welcomes healthy debate about a contentious world in his classroom

Ideas matter to University of Virginia politics professor John M. Owen IV. “Many scholars in the field really don’t talk about ideas,” said Owen, the Ambassador Henry J. and Mrs. Marion R. Taylor Professor of Politics, and a senior fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and the Miller Center for Public Affairs. “International relations for them is about material power – weapons, ships, soldiers, technology or money. And ideas really aren’t a part of this picture, except in a trivial way. I’ve always thought that’s wrong. Ideas do matter,” he said. “The notion that politics is just about who has the most guns has never been satisfactory to me – it’s also who’s got the words and the ideas.”

John M. Owen IV