PNHP-NY Metro provides expert speakers to discuss health care reform and present the evidence that improved Medicare-for-All is the solution. Our speakers can also address the merits of a single-payer health care system in New York State.
Our speakers do not charge for their time and have no financial conflicts of interest.
Contact PNHP-NY Metro to arrange a speaker for your audience at [email protected] or call 646-866-7671.
Speaker Bios
Oliver Fein, M.D., Chapter Chair
Dr. Oliver Fein is a past president of PNHP. A general internist who is active in clinical practice, he is also professor of clinical medicine and clinical public health at Weill Medical College of Cornell University, where he serves as associate dean responsible for the Office of Affiliations and the Office of Global Health Education. Dr. Fein has advocated for an expanded role for primary care, for academic health centers in urban health care delivery systems, and for national health system reform. He was Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellow during 1993-1994, when he worked in the office of Senate Democratic Majority Leader George Mitchell. He spent 17 years at the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center developing community-based ambulatory care practices and the Division of General Medicine. He is chair of the NY Chapter of PNHP and immediate past vice president of the American Public Health Association.
Laura S. Boylan, M.D.
Dr. Boylan hails from NYC and is a neurologist on faculty at the NYU School of Medicine. Speaking experience on health care systems and reform includes addressing community organizations, adolescent and senior citizen groups as well as medical student and subspecialty audiences. Once, she spoke in Spanish following the sermon at a church in Washington Heights. Media appearances include interviews on FoxBusiness and Al Jazeera. Her writing has appeared in the Nation, the New York Times and in the scientific literature. Facilitating discussion and Q&As following theatrical productions has been a pleasure. Clinical practice includes diverse hospital systems in NYC and in smaller towns and rural areas in three states. Currently she commutes intermittently to Northern Minnesota from NYC, providing care in a neurologically underserved community while continuing to teach at NYU.
Mark Hannay, Metro New York Health Care for All Campaign
Mark Hannay is Director of the Metro New York Health Care for All Campaign, a citywide coalition of community groups and labor unions founded in 1993 that advocates for fundamental health care reform leading to a universal health care program. Mark began his health activist career in 1991 as a member of the Insurance and Health Care Access Committee of ACT UP/New York. During the Clinton health care reform period of 1993-4, Mark worked as a Public Policy Associate at Gay Men’s Health Crisis, where he focused on health care and insurance issues for people living with HIV.
Since 2002, Mark has co-hosted the weekly “Health Action” program broadcast over WBAI/Pacifica radio. Mark was a recipient of the 2012 Tisch Community Health Prize given by the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College, and served 5 years on the Community Advisory Committee of the New York State Health Foundation. He is a member of the Greater New York City Regional Advisory Committee for New York State’s new health benefits exchange marketplace, known as “New York State of Health”.
David Himmelstein, M.D.
Dr. David Himmelstein is professor in the CUNY School of Public Health at Hunter College, adjunct clinical professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and lecturer in medicine at Harvard Medical School. He has served as chief of the division of social and community medicine at Cambridge Hospital.
Dr. Himmelstein has authored or co-authored more than 100 journal articles and three books, including widely cited studies of medical bankruptcy and the high administrative costs of the U.S. health care system. His 1984 study of patient dumping led to the enactment of EMTALA, the law that banned that practice.
A co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program, Dr. Himmelstein co-edits PNHP’s newsletter and is a principal author of PNHP articles published in the JAMA and the New England Journal of Medicine in conjunction with Dr. Steffie Woolhandler.
Dr. Himmelstein received his medical degree from Columbia University and completed internal medicine training at Highland Hospital/University of California San Francisco and a fellowship in general internal medicine at Harvard.
Martha Livingston, PhD
Martha Livingston, Ph.D., a Flushing resident, is Professor and Chair of the Public Health department at SUNY Old Westbury, where she teaches health policy, comparative health care systems and U.S. health care. She is Vice-Chair of the Board of Directors of the New York Metro chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program,a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Public Health Policy, a member of the Steering Committee of the Labor Campaign for Single Payer Health Care, co-editor, with Mary E. O’Brien, M.D., of 10 Excellent Reasons for National Health Care (New York: The New Press, 2008), and a serious New York Mets fan.
Daniel Lugassy, M.D.
Daniel Lugassy, M.D., is an Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine practicing in the emergency departments of NYU Medical Center and Bellevue Hospital. He is also a Medical Toxicologist working as a consultant for the New York City Poison Control Center. In 2001, while in medical school at SUNY Downstate, he founded a student chapter of PNHP. In addition to his clinical duties he enjoys his prominent role in the didactic education of medical students, residents and fellows in the areas of emergency medicine and toxicology. “Establishing a single-payer system in the US is not only a personal goal, but a professional obligation to the patients I care for everyday. Over the last ten years, PNHP has provided me with the tools necessary to educate colleagues, friends, family, medical students, and residents about why we are in desperate need of genuine healthcare reform. It would be a privilege to serve on the PNHP-NY Metro Chapter board and I hope to enhance our efforts in medical student outreach and education.”
Dr. Moore earned his M.D. and M.P.H. degrees in 1981 from the Yale School of Medicine. He subsequently completed a three-year surgical residency at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York. In 1988 he opened a full-time general medicine practice in Brooklyn distinguishing himself by his service to his community and to his profession. He then made a significant decision to pursue the challenges of Emergency Medicine, becoming board certified in 1994. Currently, he teaches medical students from Weill Medical College of Cornell University and nurse practitioner students from New York University and Hunter College Nursing Schools. He has been an attending physician at New York Methodist Hospital since 1990.
Mary O’Brien, M.D.
Dr. O’Brien graduated from Harvard Medical School, trained at Columbia Presbyterian in internal medicine, and is double boarded in Emergency Medicine and Internal Medicine. Dr. O’Brien has practiced medicine in NYC for the past 30 years and is on the faculty at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons. Dr. O’Brien is on the board of NY Metro chapter of PNHP and chairs the Media/Communications Committee. She co-edited “10 Excellent Reasons for National Health Care,” a small pocket book published in 2008.
Len Rodberg, PhD
Leonard Rodberg holds a PhD in theoretical physics from MIT. He served as Director of the Science Policy Office in the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in the 1960s, and then as a Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC. He began his health care reform activities in 1974, when he led the development of the Dellums Health Service Act. He was one of the founders of Physicians for a National Health Program in the late 1980s. He is now on the Board of the NY Metro Chapter, is Treasurer and Research Director of the Chapter, and is on the Board of the Campaign for New York Health as well.
Dr. Rodberg recently retired as Professor and Chair of the Urban Studies Department at Queens College. He directs the Infoshare Community Data Service (www.infoshare.org), which provides health and demographic data on the communities of New York City and State. He speaks and writes frequently for the Chapter.
Elizabeth Rosenthal, M.D.
Dr. Rosenthal is a retired dermatologist who resides in Mamaroneck, NY (Westchester County). She comes from a family of doctors and graduated from NYU Medical School in 1967. She completed her postgraduate training at several different places, including Syracuse, Detroit, and Boston. She was in practice in Mamaroneck for 31 years and continues to serve on the volunteer faculty of Albert Einstein College of Medicine where she supervises residents and students in the Pediatric Dermatology clinic.
Lucia Somberg, M.D., M.P.H.
Dr. Somberg is an emergency medicine resident at Jacobi/Montefiore. On her work she states, "Every day I see patients with no health insurance and only emergency medical care. Before starting medical school, I worked as an epidemiologist doing infectious disease surveillance in China and environmental public health tracking in California. In California, our group collaborated with local community organizations to investigate the effects of air pollution and pesticides on health in the community. I entered the medical field in order to effect social change, advance public health, and meaningfully partner with patients.”
Peter Steinglass, M.D.
Dr. Steinglass is President Emeritus of the Ackerman Institute for the Family, and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Weill/Cornell University Medical College. He is also Director of the Ackerman’s Center for Substance Abuse and the Family. He hopes his family clinical and research expertise, and his interest in bringing a stronger family focus to health care delivery, will continue to add an important perspective to the Board. Dr. Steinglass has been giving Grand Rounds lectures on behalf of PNHP to various psychiatry, medicine and pediatrics departments in the NYC Metro area.
Hal Strelnick, M.D.
Dr. Strelnick is Professor of Family & Social Medicine and Assistant Dean for Community Engagement at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where he founded and directs the Institute for Community & Collaborative Health and NY’s only Hispanic Center of Excellence. He is Principal Investigator of the NIH-funded Bronx Center to Reduce & Eliminate Ethnic & Racial Health Disparities (Bronx CREED) and NYSDOH-funded Bronx-Einstein Alliance for Tobacco-Free Health and Environmental Services (Bronx BREATHES). He serves as Community Engagement Core Director for the Einstein-Montefiore Institute for Clinical and Translational Research. He received his M.D. from Yale, completed his residency in family medicine at Montefiore Medical Center, and then practiced at the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Health Center in the South Bronx in the National Health Service Corps before joining the Residency Program in Social Medicine faculty in 1981, where he has practiced clinical and social medicine ever since.
Steffie Woolhandler, M.D., MPH
Dr. Steffie Woolhandler is a practicing primary care physician, professor in the CUNY School of Public Health at Hunter College, adjunct clinical professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and lecturer in medicine at Harvard Medical School, where she co-directed the general internal medicine fellowship program and practiced primary care internal medicine at Cambridge Hospital.
Dr. Woolhandler earned her bachelor’s degree from Stanford University; her medical degree from Louisiana State University; and her master’s degree from the University of California. She worked in 1990-1991 as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation health policy fellow at the Institute of Medicine and the U.S. Congress.
Dr. Woolhandler is a frequent speaker and has written extensively on health policy, administrative overhead and the uninsured. She has authored more than 150 journal articles, reviews, chapters, and books on health policy. A co-founder and board member of Physicians for a National Health Program, Dr. Woolhandler co-edits PNHP’s newsletter and is a principal author of PNHP articles published in the JAMA and the New England Journal of Medicine in conjunction with Dr. David Himmelstein.