Scholar known for health care analysis

Uwe E. Reinhardt, an economist who gained international renown for diagnosing the ills of the U.S. health-care system, and who drew on ethics as well as data in offering remedies to policymakers and physicians, patients and the public, died Nov. 13 in Princeton, N.J. He was 80.

His death was announced by the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, where he had taught for nearly five decades. Other details were not immediately available.

Few scholars had greater influence than Reinhardt on the analysis of health care in the United States. Ezekiel Emanuel, chairman of the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, described him in an interview as “one of the giants of health care policy and economics.”

Reinhardt provided a “great moral conscience” and was an “educator in the widest sense,” Emanuel said, not just for “his students at Princeton but everyone in America.” Emanuel credited him with showing that a more equitable health-care system was both desirable and possible.

During the political battles over the 2010 Affordable Care Act, during discussions of the failed Clinton health-care plan in the 1990s, and long before, Reinhardt was a pre-eminent source for lawmakers, business executives and journalists on the economics of medical care. Born in Germany and educated partly in Canada, he brought to the fraught debate the clarity of one who has experienced several different health systems firsthand.

He described Americans as “the least well-insured people on Earth” and U.S. employers, who often provide employees with insurance, as arguably the “sloppiest purchasers of health care anywhere.” Known for a plain-spoken style, he boasted of making similar remarks directly to the Business Council, an association of executives.

Appearing before congressional panels, on the speaking circuit and in the media, Reinhardt enumerated the flaws of the U.S. system as he saw them — the fragility of employmentbased plans, the number of people who carry no insurance, and the unpredictable and often exorbitant cost of services.

Victor Fuchs, a Stanford University professor emeritus of health policy, said in an interview that Reinhardt was a leading advocate for “some form of national health insurance,” such as the German system.

“I believe it is still the best model there is, because it blends a private health-care delivery system with universal coverage and social solidarity,” Reinhardt told the New York Times in 2009. “The financing is simple. It’s inexpensive and equitable. Coverage is portable. No family goes broke over health care bills.”

Emanuel remarked that Reinhardt escaped the flaw — popularly attributed to economists and cynics — of knowing “the price of everything but the value of nothing.” Reinhardt knew well, Emanuel said, “that price was just one aspect of the value of health care.”