Riley taught a seminar last year focusing on the health care reform debate and has written and presented extensively about biomedical research, genetics, reproductive technologies, stem cell research, animal biotechnology, health disparities and chronic disease. She serves as chair of U.Va.'s Embryonic Stem Cell Research Oversight Committee and as legal adviser to the Health Sciences Institutional Review Board, which is responsible for reviewing all human-subject research at U.Va. involving medically invasive procedures.

"I am quite sure that something will pass," she said of health care legislation. "The question is how comprehensive it will be, what or who will be left out and what funding sources will be used. But for a comprehensive plan to pass, all the cards will have to line up perfectly, there will need to be a stronger sense of cooperation than I've seen thus far in Congress, and a great deal of political luck will be needed.

"Everyone agrees that some change is needed, but they disagree on what that change should be. And everyone's second choice is to do nothing, and that is a position that may have less political risk, especially in this economy."

Eric Patashnik

Patashnik is an expert on the politics of health care and a U.Va. professor of politics and public policy. Recently, he was appointed associate dean of the Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy and was awarded two national grants to research the politics of efforts to improve the use of evidence in medical decisions. He is the author of "Reforms at Risk: What Happens After Major Policy Changes Are Enacted" (Princeton University Press, 2008). Patashnik says that both sides in the health-care debate are using scare tactics to make their points. "There is considerable social science evidence that voters exhibit a negativity bias, meaning they focus more on losses than on gains of equal size. It should not be a surprise that senior citizens - who fear cuts to their Medicare benefits - have been more vocal than have the people who would benefit from expanded insurance coverage."

Carolyn Engelhard

Engelhard is a U.Va. assistant professor of medical education and a health policy analyst at the Department of Public Health Sciences. She is the co-author with Dr. Arthur Garson Jr. and the Urban Institute of "Reducing Obesity: Strategies from the Tobacco Wars," a provocative paper which garnered a great deal of media attention and comment. ngelhard says politicians and stakeholders less interested in health care reform than in winning: "Those politicians and stakeholders around the table don't really care. What they want is to get what they want. They want to win. So politics is really about power, more than truth. And it's about winning, more than being right."

Source: University of Virginia