Prof turns down job on health care team

An assistant professor in the Medical School has turned down an offer this week for a full-time position on the federal Health Care Task Force. Assistant Medicine and Health Care Systems Professor Alan Hillman said task force coordinators asked him to take a three-month leave of absence from the University, but he declined yesterday for personal and family reasons. The task force, chaired by Hillary Rodham Clinton, is composed of several hundred doctors and health care professionals whose aim is to improve health care in America, a White House spokesperson said yesterday. But Hillman said he would instead serve as a consultant to the task force's working group on quality in health care and will stay in Philadelphia and at the University. The White House said that consultants to the task force are "quite common" and many people have made decisions not to give up their jobs and head to Washington. The working group on quality will research how to assure quality in a system of managed competition. "The key is to make sure the patient quality of care is not compromised," Hillman said. President Clinton's health care policy is expected to seriously affect managed health care, New York psychologist Ellis Barowsky said yesterday. "The way [health management organizations] work will have to be seriously changed," Barowsky said. "We'll also have to watch how the quality of managed health care changes." Hillman said one of the reasons he was chosen for the Task Force is his academic expertise in managed care and how physicians behave in managed care situations. Hillman has consulted with Washington in the past, but has never been a full-time government employee. The task force's work has already begun, and will continue through early May, when the White House said it hopes to have its health plan completed.

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