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The U.S. Health Policy Community: A View from Europe

A Discussion With

Ulrike Lepont, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Researcher
University of Montpellier

Wednesday September 18, 2019
12:30 – 2:00 p.m.
Mather House, Room 100
11201 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, OH

American health policy involves not only political institutions and their elected and appointed officials but a whole ecology of experts who produce research and proposals, promote ideas at conferences and in the press, and advise policy-makers. Ulrike Lepont’s strikingly original dissertation used both documents and extensive interviews to outline how this health policy community influenced choices from 1970 – 2010. Join us as she describes the community that American analysts may take for granted because they are part of it.

Refreshments Will Be Provided
Cosponsored by the CWRU Center for Policy Studies and
the Master of Public Health Program

About Our Guest

Ulrike Lepont did her doctoral research in France with the groups of scholars at Université Montpellier 1 and Université Versailles-Saint-Quentin-Yvelines. Her thesis – “Shaping Policies at the State’s Margins: The role of experts in American health care reforms (1970-2010)” was approved at Montpellier in December, 2014 and in 2015 received the public policy dissertation prize from the association française de science politique. She has published articles based on this work in Revue française de science politique, Revue française de sociologie, Politix, and Gouvernement et action politique. She is now presenting her work at U.S.conferences and has papers under submission to U.S. journals.

Dr. Lepont’s further research has investigated other examples of the politics of ideas, such as the idea that health care costs can be reduced by improving quality (rather than more quality having to be paid for) and a comparison of how economists’ views changed, or did not, in France and the United States after the 2008 financial crash. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Montpellier, and has also continued her research at Université de Versailles Saint Quentin, the Center on the Sociology of Organizations at SciencesPo Paris, and as a member of the research team for PRINTEMPS, a joint CNRS/UVSQ project that focuses on professional worlds (such as commitments, knowledge and expertise) and how their members are socialized and build their careers. Dr. Lepont also is currently part of the ANR Desorbercy project, which focuses on how the structures of politics, economics, and finance respond and change in contexts of disorder and expert uncertainty about what to do.