UW-Whitewater: Journalist Trudy Lieberman to share insight on health care reform

Contact: Pete Mesner

(262) 472-5139

mesnerp@uww.edu

WHITEWATER ­ As the U.S. moves forward after passing historic health care legislation, Trudy Lieberman, an award-winning journalist and renowned blogger in the health care community, will visit the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater to share insight on the issue.

Her lecture, “Health Reform—Reality or Myth,” will take place at 7 p.m., Wednesday, March 31, in the Timmerman Auditorium in Timothy J. Hyland Hall. The lecture is free and open to the public, and will include a question and answer session.

The UW-Whitewater Pre-Health Associates of Today club will sponsor the lecture with help from the College of Letters and Sciences and the Biological Sciences Department.

Pete Mesner, associate biology professor at UW-Whitewater, heard Lieberman speak about health care on a television program and recommended her to the club.

“I challenged the club to do something to enhance the health care picture on campus,” he said. “They were looking for a speaker and I recommended Lieberman because she was very plain-spoken and backed up her ideas with evidence.”

Lieberman is the former director of the Center for Consumer Health Choices at Consumers Union and is now the director of the health and medical reporting program for the graduate school of journalism at City University of New York. She has been a contributor on health care to magazines like The Nation and the Columbia Journalism Review, and has won two National Magazine Awards and 10 National Press Club Awards.

“I really think anybody who cares about the future, their loved ones and the future of the country needs to be interested in understanding this,” Mesner said. “There¹s a lot of noise about this in the world and I saw Lieberman as someone who could cut through the noise.”

Mesner hopes that all in attendance get a better grasp of the health care picture.

“I hope they take away an understanding of the really important decisions we have to make,” he said. “People of this [college age] generation will have to live with these decisions.”