Meena Seshamani center-stage in Obama health-care reform

FULL TEXT

As concern mounts over the cost of health-care reform, an Indian-American physician's expertise could be critical in helping the Obama administration to figure out how to finance the President's planned expansion of health-care coverage for all Americans.

Dr Meena Seshamani, who has

been flying under the radar for the past few months as Director of Policy Analysis, Health and Human Services Office of Health Reform, has spent years studying health-care policy, including extensive research on how aging populations affect these costs, and is expected to bring this expertise to bear when the final legislation is worked out between the administration and Congress.

"In my job I bring the perspective of both a physician and an economist to examine various policy options across the range of issues in health reform," Seshamani, who coordinates the quantitative and qualitative analyzes of healthcare reform conducted throughout HHS, told India Abroad.

"I work with Jeanne Lambrew, who is Director of the Office of Health Reform and Neera Tanden, who is Senior Advisor, and also in concert with various agencies and offices in the administration like the Office of Management and Budget and the Council of Economic Advisers on health reform issues."

The Warren, New Jersey-born Seshamani spoke of the honor of being able to work on such a critical issue, one that is central to the Obama administration's to-do list, and pointed out that her appointment to the job came about because before taking up the administration job, she had worked with then Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and Lambrew "to examine how businesses provide health benefits to their employees."

She had co-authored a report on financing the US health system with Lambrew and Joe Antos for the Bipartisan Policy Center, a public policy advocacy organization founded by former US Senate Majority Leaders Howard Baker, Bob Dole and George Mitchell, besides Daschle.

The report had determined that "each (financing proposal) would only be enacted as part of a plan that also improved the efficiency, accessibility, affiordability and quality of health-care and reduced unnecessary spending. "

'The issue that will need to be addressed with any healthcare reform plan is whether the societal and economic costs of the investment in the nation's health-care system are worth the benefits gained,' she wrote in the report.

"As a result of this work with Senator Daschle and Dr Lambrew, the opportunity came to take part in health reform in the Obama administration," Seshamani told India Abroad.

Daschle, an Obama confidante and author of the seminal 2008 book Critical: What We Can do About the Healthcare Crisis, was initially nominated Secretary of the HHS, but withdrew following questions about a lobbyist providing him with a free limousine service. He, however, remains a close advisor to Obama.

Seshamani is an alumnus of Brown University, where she completed her undergraduate degree in business economics and earned her BA with honors, magna cum laude in 1997. Her undergraduate thesis was an analysis of the nonclinical influences on a mother's decision to have a cesarean section.

After two years of medical school at Brown, Seshamani won the prestigious Marshall Scholarship to study at Oxford University in England, where she did her PhD in health economics. Her research focused on the impact of aging populations on health-care costs in nations with public health-care systems including the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan and Australia, and her doctoral research was cited by Great Britain's Treasury Department in its health expenditure analyzes.

On her return to the US, she finished the last two years of medical school at the University of Pennsylvania, from where she received her MD in 2005. Her research examining the impact of Medicare reimbursement cuts on hospital mortality received a Most Outstanding Abstract citation from the Academy of Health.

Seshamani has also served as a consultant for the Gates Foundation, and as a reviewer for several medical and health policy journals. Before joining the administration, Seshamani was resident physician in the Department of Otolaryngology (Head and Neck Surgery) at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine 2005- 2009.

Her Chennai-born father Mani Seshamani is executive vice president, commercial operations, Hitachi Power Systems, and mother Rama Seshamani, also from Chennai, is a physician and executive director, Drug Regulatory Affairs with the pharmaceutical giant Novartis. She has one sibling, Uma Seshamani, who works as an investment banker for Barclays Capital in New York City.