The Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE) honored top students of the 2016 Reischauer Scholars Program (RSP) and Stanford e-Japan (Spring Session) at “Japan–U.S. Day”—an event held at Stanford University on August 9, 2016. The RSP honorees were Pierce Lowary (Highland Park High School, Dallas, Texas), Sarah Ohta (Polytechnic High School, Pasadena, California), and Risako Yang (Castilleja School, Palo Alto, California), and the Stanford e-Japan honorees were Miyu Hayashi (Takada High School, Mie Prefecture) and Minoru Takeuchi (Senior High School at Otsuka, University of Tsukuba, Tokyo).
Japan–U.S. Day began with opening remarks by the Honorable Jun Yamada, Consul General of Japan in San Francisco. Praising the honorees and their fellow students for their dedication to the study of U.S.–Japan relations, Consul General Yamada noted, “The U.S.–Japan relationship is the most important bilateral relationship in the world today,” and underscored the importance of programs such as the RSP and Stanford e-Japan in engaging youth in the study of this critical relationship.
Stanford e-Japan Instructor Waka Takahashi Brown and RSP Instructor Naomi Funahashi presented overviews of the two programs to the audience of over 50 people, which included Ambassador Michael Armacost (former U.S. Ambassador to Japan), Consul Akira Ichioka (Director, Japan Information and Cultural Center, Consulate General of Japan in San Francisco), Professor Indra Levy (Stanford University), Professor Emeritus Daniel Okimoto (Stanford University), and Maiko Tamagawa (Advisor for Educational Affairs, Consulate General of Japan in San Francisco).
The students were recognized by Brown and Funahashi for their overall coursework performance, which included research essays. They articulately presented their research that focused on topics ranging from legacies of World War II and security issues to urban planning in Japan, longevity, and non-profit organizations, and they adroitly addressed questions from the audience.
[[{"fid":"223802","view_mode":"crop_870xauto","fields":{"format":"crop_870xauto","field_file_image_description[und][0][value]":"Ambassador Armacost chats with student honoree, Minoru Takeuchi","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"","field_credit[und][0][value]":"Rylan Sekiguchi","field_caption[und][0][value]":"","field_related_image_aspect[und][0][value]":"","thumbnails":"crop_870xauto"},"type":"media","attributes":{"width":"870","style":"padding: 6px; float: left; width: 420px; height: 267px;","class":"media-element file-crop-870xauto"}}]]This year marked the first time that a joint RSP/Stanford e-Japan event was held to honor students. Reflecting on the event, Funahashi commented, “It was a great opportunity to recognize the impressive work of young U.S.–Japan scholars. And seeing them engage in cross-cultural dialogue in person after months of online interaction was a real treat.” Brown agreed, adding, “For my students, having the opportunity to interact with peers from the United States was one of the highlights of the program. To see all the RSP and Stanford e-Japan award winners honored at the same event was extremely rewarding and gave me great hope for the future of U.S.–Japan relations.” The audience seemed to feel similarly. “It was wonderful seeing the American and Japanese students interact with one another,” said Ambassador Armacost. “Their remarks were thoughtful and articulate. It was a model of timely educational exchange.”
SPICE has received numerous grants in support of the RSP (since its inception in 2003) from the United States-Japan Foundation, the Center for Global Partnership (The Japan Foundation), and the Japan Fund, which is administered by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. Stanford e-Japan (since its inception in 2015) has been supported by a grant from the United States-Japan Foundation.
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Student honorees: Pierce Lowary (Highland Park High School, Dallas, Texas), Risako Yang (Castilleja School, Palo Alto, California), Sarah Ohta (Polytechnic High School, Pasadena, California), Miyu Hayashi (Takada High School, Mie Prefecture) and Minoru Takeuchi (Senior High School at Otsuka, University of Tsukuba, Tokyo). | Rylan Sekiguchi
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The symposium will focus on the key questions that impact health through the year 2020. How could the 2016 election affect health care in the U.S.? How will payment reform affect health systems, physicians and patients? Are the insurance exchanges viable? What challenges pose the biggest threat to global health? Experts from Stanford and beyond address these topics and more as they discuss the future of health policy.
Lloyd Minor, Dean, Stanford University School of Medicine
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Minor, MD, is a scientist, surgeon and academic leader. He is the Carl and Elizabeth Naumann Dean of the Stanford University School of Medicine, a position he has held since December 2012. Minor leads more than 1,500 faculty and 1,000 students at the oldest medical school in the West and has made precision health — the prevention of disease before it strikes — a hallmark of research, education and patient care at Stanford Medicine.
Bob Kocher,a partner at the Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Venrock
Bob Kocher
Kocher, MD, is a partner at Venrock who focuses on healthcare IT and services investments and is a consulting professor at Stanford University School of Medicine. He served in the Obama Administration as special assistant to the president for health care and economic policy and was one of the key shapers of the Affordable Care Act.
David Entwistle, President and CEO, Stanford Health Care
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Entwistle joined Stanford Health Care as its President and CEO in July, bringing extensive executive experience at leading academic medical centers. Most recently he served as CEO of the University of Utah Hospitals & Clinics, the only academic medical center in the Intermountain West region. While serving at UUHC, Entwistle received the Modern Healthcare “Up and Comers Award,” for significant contributions in health-care administration, management or policy.
Chris Dawes, President and CEO, Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital
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Christopher G. Dawes became President and Chief Executive Officer of Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford in 1997 after five years of service as Chief Operating Officer. Under his guidance, the hospital, research center and regional medical network has been ranked as one of the best in the nation, as an industry leader in patient safety and innovation in providing a full complement of services for children and expectant mothers.
Panelists:
Marcella Alsan, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Stanford University
Marcella Alsan’s research focuses on the relationship between health and socioeconomic disparities with a focus on infectious disease. Another vein of research focuses on the microfoundations of antibiotic overuse and resistance. She received a BA degree in cognitive neuroscience from Harvard University, a master’s degree in international public health from Harvard School of Public Health, a medical degree from Loyola University, and a PhD in economics from Harvard University. She is board-certified in both internal medicine and infectious disease. She trained at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, completing the Hiatt Global Health Equity Residency Fellowship in internal medicine. She combined her PhD with an Infectious Disease Fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital. She currently is an infectious disease specialist at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Palo Alto.
Laurence Baker, Chair of Health Research and Policy, Stanford University
Laurence Baker is an economist interested in the organization and economic performance of the U.S. health-care system, and his research has investigated a range of topics including financial incentives in health care, competition in health-care markets, health insurance and managed care and health-care technology adoption. Baker is a past recipient of the ASHE medal from ASHEcon and the Alice Hersch Award from AcademyHealth. He received his BA from Calvin College, and his MA and PhD in economics from Princeton University.
Eran Bendavid, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Stanford University
Eran Bendavid is an infectious diseases physician. His research interests involve understanding the relationship between policies and health outcomes in developing countries. He explores how decisions about foreign assistance for health are made, and how those decisions affect the health of those whom assistance aims to serve. Dr. Bendavid is also a disease modeler, and uses that skill to explore issues of resource allocation in low and middle-income countries with cost-effectiveness analyses. His recent research projects include an impact evaluation of the US assistance program for HIV in Africa, and an exploration of the association between drug prices, aid and health outcomes in countries heavily affected by HIV.
Jay Bhattacharya, Professor of Medicine, Stanford University
Jay Bhattacharya’s research focuses on the constraints that vulnerable populations face in making decisions that affect their health status, as well as the effects of government policies and programs designed to benefit vulnerable populations. He has published empirical economics and health services research on the elderly, adolescents, HIV/AIDS and managed care. Most recently, he has researched the regulation of the viatical-settlements market (a secondary life-insurance market that often targets HIV patients) and summer/winter differences in nutritional outcomes for low-income American families. He is also working on a project examining the labor-market conditions that help determine why some U.S. employers do not provide health insurance.
M. Kate Bundorf, Associate Professor of Medicine, Stanford University
M. Kate Bundorf is a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She received her M.B.A. and M.P.H. degrees from The University of California at Berkeley and her Ph.D. from The Wharton School. She was a Fulbright Lecturer and Visiting Professor at Fudan School of Public Health in Shanghai, China in 2009 and 2010. Her research, which focuses on health insurance markets, has been published in leading economics and health policy journals and has received funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She received the 13th Annual Health Care Research Award from The National Institute for Health Care Management in 2007.
David Chan, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Stanford University
David Chan is a physician and economist whose research focuses on productivity in US health care. His research draws on insights from labor and organizational economics. He is particularly interested in studying what drives physician behavior, how this explains differences in productivity in health care delivery, and what the implications are for the design of health care. He is the recipient of the 2014 NIH Director’s High-Risk, High-Reward Early Independence Award to study the optimal balance of information in health information technology for patient care. David Chan is also an investigator at the Department of Veterans Affairs and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Kathryn M. McDonald, Executive Director of the Center for Health Policy and the Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research, Stanford University
Kathryn McDonald, MM, is the Executive Director of the Center for Health Policy (CHP) and Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research (PCOR) and a senior scholar at the Centers. She is also Associate Director of the Stanford-UCSF Evidence-based Practice Center (under RAND). Her work focuses on measures and interventions to achieve evidence-based patient-centered healthcare quality and patient safety. Mrs. McDonald has served as a project director and principal investigator on a number of research projects at the Stanford School of Medicine, including the development and ongoing enhancement of the Quality and Patient Safety Indicators for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. She has authored numerous peer reviewed articles and government reports, including several with wide enough followership to merit recent updates: Care Coordination Measures Atlas, Closing the Quality Gap, and Patient Safety Practices.
Michelle Mello, Professor of Law and of Health Research and Policy, Stanford University
Michelle Mello is Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and Professor of Health Research and Policy at Stanford University School of Medicine. She conducts empirical research into issues at the intersection of law, ethics, and health policy. She is the author of more than 150 articles and book chapters on the medical malpractice system, medical errors and patient safety, public health law, research ethics, the obesity epidemic, pharmaceuticals, and other topics. From 2000 to 2014, Dr. Mello was a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, where she directed the School’s Program in Law and Public Health. In 2013-14 she completed a Lab Fellowship at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. Dr. Mello teaches courses in torts and public health law. She holds a J.D. from the Yale Law School, a Ph.D. in Health Policy and Administration from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an M.Phil. from Oxford University, where she was a Marshall Scholar, and a B.A. from Stanford University. In 2013, she was elected to the National Academy of Medicine (formerly known as the Institute of Medicine).
Grant Miller, Associate Professor of Medicine, Stanford University
Grant Miller is Director of the Stanford Center for International Development, an Associate Professor of Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine, a Core Faculty Member at the Center for Health Policy/Primary Care and Outcomes Research, a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). His primary interests are health economics, development economics, and economic demography. As a health and development economist based at the Stanford Medical School, Dr. Miller’s overarching focus is research and teaching aimed at developing more effective health improvement strategies for developing countries. His agenda addresses three major interrelated themes. (1) First, what are the major causes of population health improvement around the world and over time? (2) Second, what are the behavioral underpinnings of the major determinants of population health improvement? (3) Third, how can programs and policies use these behavioral insights to improve population health more effectively?
Douglas K. Owens, Director of the Center for Health Policy and the Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research, Stanford University
Douglas K. Owens, MD, MS, is the Henry J. Kaiser, Jr., Professor at Stanford University, where he is a professor of medicine. He is director of the Center for Health Policy in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and director of the Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research (PCOR) in the Department of Medicine. He is a general internist and associate director of the Center for Innovation to Implementation at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System. A past member of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, he has helped lead the development of national U.S. guidelines on screening for HIV, hepatitis C, hepatitis B, lung cancer, colorectal cancer, breast cancer, and use of aspirin and statins to prevent cardiovascular disease.
Maria Polyakova, Assistant Professor of Health Research and Policy, Stanford University
Maria Polyakova, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Health Research and Policy at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Her research investigates questions surrounding the role of government in the design and financing of health insurance systems. She is especially interested in the relationships between public policies and individuals’ decision-making in health care and health insurance, as well as in the risk protection and re-distributive aspects of health insurance systems. She received a BA degree in Economics and Mathematics from Yale University and a PhD in Economics from MIT.
David M. Studdert, Professor of Medicine and of Law, Stanford University
David M. Studdert is a leading expert in the fields of health law and empirical legal research. His scholarship explores how the legal system influences the health and well-being of populations. A prolific scholar, he has authored more than 150 articles and book chapters, and his work appears frequently in leading international medical, law and health policy publications. Professor Studdert has received the Alice S. Hersh New Investigator Award from AcademyHealth, the leading organization for health services and health policy research in the United States. He was awarded a Federation Fellowship (2006) and a Laureate Fellowship (2011) by the Australian Research Council. He holds a law degree from University of Melbourne and a doctoral degree in health policy and public health from the Harvard School of Public Health.
Accurate and timely estimates of population characteristics are a critical input to research and policy, but reliable data is often scarce in developing and conflict-affected regions. In recent work, we have shown how machine learning algorithms can be applied to mobile phone metadata to infer fixed characteristics of individual subscribers, such as wealth and gender. Here, we describe efforts to extend this approach to a non-stationary regime, to detect and measure changes in an individual's welfare over time. For this study, we tracked 1200 Afghan citizens with high-frequency panel surveys, and matched each person's responses to psuedonymized transactions log of mobile phone activity. Preliminary results indicate that it is possible to detect negative shocks (e.g., violence), and positive shocks (e.g., receiving a gift) from the mobile phone records alone. This suggests the possibility of real-time tracking of vulnerability, and new paradigms for program monitoring and impact evaluation.
Speaker Bio:
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Joshua Blumenstock is an Assistant Professor at the U.C. Berkeley School of Information. His research develops theory and methods for the analysis of large-scale behavioral data, with a focus on how such data can be used to better understand poverty and economic development. Recent projects combine field experiments with big spatiotemporal network data to model decision-making in poor and conflict-affected regions of the world. Prior to joining UW, Joshua was on the faculty at the University of Washington, where he founded and co-directed the Data Science and Analytics Lab. He has a Ph.D. in Information Science and a M.A. in Economics from U.C. Berkeley, and Bachelor’s degrees in Computer Science and Physics from Wesleyan University. He is a recipient of the Intel Faculty Early Career Honor, a Gates Millennium Grand Challenge award, a Google Faculty Research Award, and a former fellow of the Thomas J. Watson Foundation and the Harvard Institutes of Medicine.
Joshua Blumenstock
Assistant Professor at the U.C. Berkeley School of Information
What will happen when a new US president is sworn in? Michael McFaul, former US ambassador to Russia and director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, leads a panel of faculty experts to discuss the imminent foreign policy challenges that the next president must face.
CDDRL
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C147
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
(650) 724-6448
(650) 723-1928
0
ldiamond@stanford.edu
Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science and Sociology
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MA, PhD
Larry Diamond is the William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He is also professor by courtesy of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford, where he lectures and teaches courses on democracy (including an online course on EdX). At the Hoover Institution, he co-leads the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and participates in the Project on the U.S., China, and the World. At FSI, he is among the core faculty of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, which he directed for six and a half years. He leads FSI’s Israel Studies Program and is a member of the Program on Arab Reform and Development. He also co-leads the Global Digital Policy Incubator, based at FSI’s Cyber Policy Center. He served for 32 years as founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy.
Diamond’s research focuses on global trends affecting freedom and democracy and on U.S. and international policies to defend and advance democracy. His book, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency, analyzes the challenges confronting liberal democracy in the United States and around the world at this potential “hinge in history,” and offers an agenda for strengthening and defending democracy at home and abroad. A paperback edition with a new preface was released by Penguin in April 2020. His other books include: In Search of Democracy (2016), The Spirit of Democracy (2008), Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (1999), Promoting Democracy in the 1990s (1995), and Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria (1989). He has edited or coedited more than fifty books, including China’s Influence and American Interests(2019, with Orville Schell), Silicon Triangle: The United States, China, Taiwan the Global Semiconductor Security (2023, with James O. Ellis Jr. and Orville Schell), and The Troubling State of India’s Democracy(2024, with Sumit Ganguly and Dinsha Mistree).
During 2002–03, Diamond served as a consultant to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and was a contributing author of its report, Foreign Aid in the National Interest. He has advised and lectured to universities and think tanks around the world, and to the World Bank, the United Nations, the State Department, and other organizations dealing with governance and development. During the first three months of 2004, Diamond served as a senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. His 2005 book, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, was one of the first books to critically analyze America's postwar engagement in Iraq.
Among Diamond’s other edited books are Democracy in Decline?; Democratization and Authoritarianism in the Arab World; Will China Democratize?; and Liberation Technology: Social Media and the Struggle for Democracy, all edited with Marc F. Plattner; and Politics and Culture in Contemporary Iran, with Abbas Milani. With Juan J. Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset, he edited the series, Democracy in Developing Countries, which helped to shape a new generation of comparative study of democratic development.
615 Crothers Way,
Encina Commons, Room 128A
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305
(650) 721-4052
0
Research Fellow, Hoover Institution
abbas_milani_photo_by_babak_payami.jpg
PhD
Abbas Milani is the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University and a visiting professor in the department of political science. In addition, Dr. Milani is a research fellow and co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution.
Prior to coming to Stanford, Milani was a professor of history and political science and chair of the department at Notre Dame de Namur University and a research fellow at the Institute of International Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Milani was an assistant professor in the faculty of law and political science at Tehran University and a member of the board of directors of Tehran University's Center for International Studies from 1979 to 1987. He was a research fellow at the Iranian Center for Social Research from 1977 to 1978 and an assistant professor at the National University of Iran from 1975 to 1977.
Dr. Milani is the author of Eminent Persians: Men and Women Who Made Modern Iran, 1941-1979, (Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, NY, 2 volumes, November, 2008); King of Shadows: Essays on Iran's Encounter with Modernity, Persian text published in the U.S. (Ketab Corp., Spring 2005); Lost Wisdom: Rethinking Persian Modernity in Iran, (Mage 2004); The Persian Sphinx: Amir Abbas Hoveyda and the Riddle of the Iranian Revolution (Mage, 2000); Modernity and Its Foes in Iran (Gardon Press, 1998); Tales of Two Cities: A Persian Memoir (Mage 1996); On Democracy and Socialism, a collection of articles coauthored with Faramarz Tabrizi (Pars Press, 1987); and Malraux and the Tragic Vision (Agah Press, 1982). Milani has also translated numerous books and articles into Persian and English.
Milani received his BA in political science and economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1970 and his PhD in political science from the University of Hawaii in 1974.
Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies
CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, E216
Stanford, CA 94305-6165
(650) 725-9754
(650) 723-0089
0
zegart@stanford.edu
Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution
Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science
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PhD
Dr. Amy Zegart is the Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. The author of five books, she specializes in U.S. intelligence, emerging technologies, and national security. At Hoover, she leads the Technology Policy Accelerator and the Oster National Security Affairs Fellows Program. She also is an associate director and senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI; a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute; and professor of political science by courtesy, teaching 100 students each year about how emerging technologies are transforming espionage.
Her award-winning research includes the leading academic study of intelligence failures before 9/11: Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11 (Princeton, 2007) and the bestseller Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence (Princeton, 2022), which was nominated by Princeton University Press for the Pulitzer Prize. She also coauthored Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity, with Condoleezza Rice (Twelve, 2018). Her op-eds and essays have appeared in Foreign Affairs, Politico, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal.
Zegart has advised senior officials about intelligence and foreign policy for more than two decades. She served on the National Security Council staff and as a presidential campaign foreign policy advisor and has testified before numerous congressional committees. Before her academic career, she spent several years as a McKinsey & Company consultant.
Zegart received an AB in East Asian studies from Harvard and an MA and a PhD in political science from Stanford. She serves on the boards of the Council on Foreign Relations, Kratos Defense & Security Solutions, and the American Funds/Capital Group.
As Japan faces a shrinking and aging population, it must pursue productivity growth to remain a wealthy nation. Women, long underrepresented Japan’s workforce, are receiving renewed attention with the Abe administration’s slogan of Womenomics as part of his Abenomics economic reform package. In the second World Assembly for Women in Tokyo (named WAW!) in late August 2015, Prime Minister Abe even went so far as to say “Abenomics is Womenomics.” At the same time as the WAW! meeting, the National Diet passed a law requiring large companies to analyze their current status of women and set numerical targets in one of several areas. Now that the issue of women in the workplace is being taken more seriously than ever before, it is time to mobilize serious research in the form of policy evaluation, create a new dialogue that can spark innovative ideas by injecting Silicon Valley ideas and people into U.S.-Japan policy discussions, and link entrepreneurs, policymakers, and researchers from both sides to cultivate sustained interpersonal networks.
This conference takes on the issue of women leadership and women’s positions in the Japanese workforce and society, with the objective to bring issues to the table and explore concrete mechanisms by which government policy, business practices, and social factors can be influences to make concrete progress for women's leadership and participation in Japan.
Sponsored by the US-Japan Foundation (USJF), Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), and Stanford University's Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (S-APARC) and Clayman Institute for Gender Research.
*The below program is subject to change.
Conference Program
8:55-9:25 Registration and Breakfast
9:25-9:40 Welcome & Opening Remarks
Takeo Hoshi (Stanford University)
David Janes (US-Japan Foundation)
Toru Tamiya (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science)
9:40-11:00 Panel Discussion I:
Women in the Silicon Valley Ecosystem- Progress and Challenges
Chair: Shelley Correll (Stanford University)
Panelists: Ari Horie (Women's Startup Lab)
Yoky Matsuoka
Emily Murase (San Francisco Department on the Status of Women)
Mana Nakagawa (Facebook)
11:00-11:20 Coffee Break
11:20-12:40 Panel Discussion II:
Women in the Japanese Economy- Progress and Challenges
Chair: Mariko Yoshihara Yang (Stanford University)
Panelists: Mitsue Kurihara (Development Bank of Japan)
Akiko Naka (Wantedly)
Yuko Osaki (Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, Japanese Government)
Machiko Osawa (Japan Women's University)
12:40-14:00 Lunchtime
14:00-15:20 Panel Discussion III:
Women's Advancement in the Workplace
Chair: Takeo Hoshi (Stanford University)
Panelists: Keiko Honda (Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), the World Bank Group)
Chiyo Kobayashi (Washington Core)
Sachiko Kuno (S&R Foundation)
Kazuo Tase (Deloitte Tohmatsu Consulting)
15:20-15:40 Coffee Break
15:40-17:00 Panel Discussion IV:
Work-Life Balance and Womenomics
Chair: Kenji Kushida (Stanford University)
Panelists: Diane Flynn (ReBoot Career Accelerator for Women)
The paper introduces the public sector as a major source of infrastructural state capacity that helps autocrats survive. Education or social services organizations are embedded in everyday life and trusted by the people, which makes them a unique tool in autocrats’ hands. These organizations significantly extend the ability of the state apparatus to implement political decisions on the ground. Using quantitative analysis of seventy-nine Russian regions and qualitative evidence from the media, I demonstrate that Vladimir Putin’s regime used schoolteachers, who were frequently members of local electoral commissions, to implement wide-scale electoral fraud during the 2012 presidential elections in Russia. The school system served as an organizational base for this maneuver, which allowed Putin’s regime to withstand the challenge of decreased popular support. The paper proposes a distinction between the redistributive and infrastructural roles of the public sector.
Speaker Bio:
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Natalia Forrat is a Pre-doctoral Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. She will receive her PhD in Sociology from Northwestern University in 2017. She studies authoritarianism, state-society relations, state capacity, civil society, and trust with a focus on contemporary Russia. Her work has been published in Post-Soviet Affairs and supported by the Fulbright Program and the Open Society Institute. Before her doctoral studies, she received a master's degree from the University of Michigan and a bachelor's degree from Tomsk State University (Russia). She taught at TSU for a few years, while also working at a Russian NGO.
Natalia Forrat
Pre-doctoral Fellow at CDDRL, Stanford
There is much debate among health policy researchers about the performance of the Medicare Advantage plans, which are sold and run by private insurance companies, but are regulated by the government to provide Medicare benefits.
Enrollment in Medicare Advantage plans — mostly commonly HMOs and PPOs — grew from 5.4 million consumers in 2005 to 16.8 million in 2015, or about 31 percent of the Medicare population, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Some argue the private alternative to the traditional insurance program for seniors is less expensive than the public programs; others say it’s just the opposite. And still others argue that that the government overpays for people enrolled in private plans since traditional Medicare could have covered these patients for less money. But there had not been broad analyses of the prices actually paid by these plans.
Now, researchers from Stanford Medicine, the Stanford Law School and the Graduate School of Business have conducted one of the largest systematic analyses of the prices that Medicare Advantage plans pay to doctors and hospitals, relative to the prices paid by Medicare fee-for-services or commercial plans.
They found Medicare Advantage plans actually pays 8 percent less to hospitals for their services than traditional Medicare. If you make adjustments for the smaller, cheaper network of hospitals that Advantage plans allow their patients to use, the program pays 5.6 percent less to hospitals than FFS Medicare.
The researchers shared their findings in an online article in Health Affairs this week.
“That suggests that in an era when there are real questions about escalating health-care costs, we may want to think more about the potential benefits of Medicare Advantage plans,” Baker said. “It seems they are negotiating better prices.”
Either way, the savings or losses are always going to impact the patient.
“If you’re looking at it as a question of policy, this may be useful,” Baker said. “In the long run, we could pay less taxes to support the Medicare program and maybe people in Medicare Advantage would get to share in those savings.”
The other co-authors of the study are M. Kate Bundorf, professor of health research and policy and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research; Aileen M. Devlin, a research fellow at the Law School and Daniel P. Kessler, a professor in the Law School and the Graduate School of Business.
They used data from Medicare and the Health Care Cost Institute to identify the prices paid for hospital services by Medicare Advantage, FFS Medicare and commercial plans in 2009, 2011 and 2012.
The data included information from Aetna, Humana, and UnitedHealthcare on approximately 40 million individuals who represent all 50 states, accounting for 27 percent of the nonelderly population covered by commercial insurance, and 31 percent of the elderly Medicare Advantage population.
The authors also found the rates paid to hospitals by commercial plans were much higher than those of either Medicare Advantage or FFS Medicare, and that these rates are continuing to grow.
Some of the difference is a result of the much higher prices commercial plans pay for very profitable services such as orthopedics and interventional cardiology.
“However, commercial plans pay higher prices than FFS Medicare for almost all types of admissions in almost all geographic areas,” they wrote. “Thus, our work echoes the growing concerns expressed by several researchers about the consequences of high commercial-plan prices for health spending.”
The importance of detecting high cholesterol in older adults is well understood. But there’s still not enough evidence about lipid disorders in children and adolescents to determine whether they should be routinely screened.
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has concluded the evidence is insufficient to assess the balance of benefits and harms of screening for lipid disorders in children and adolescents 20 years or younger. The report appears in the Aug. 9 issue of JAMA.
High cholesterol in individuals 20 years or younger can be caused primarily by genetics, known as familial hypercholesterolemia, or from both genetic and environmental factors, such as a high-fat diet.
“We are calling for more research to better understand the benefits and harms of screening and treatment of lipid disorders in children and teens and on the impact these interventions may have on their cardiovascular health as adults,” Task Force vice chair David Grossman said in a news release.
The Task Force is an independent panel of experts who make recommendations about the effectiveness of specific preventive care services such as screenings, counseling services, and preventive medications.
The task force does, however, recommend screening children who are 6 years and older for obesity and making referrals as needed for counseling on weight management. Helping children improve diet and exercise may also improve heart health.
“Cardiovascular health in young people is important and the goal is to prevent the development of cardiovascular disease as people age,” said Douglas K. Owens, a professor of medicine at Stanford and a member of the task force when the guideline was developed. “But many important questions remain unanswered about how to do so.”
Owens, a leader at Stanford Health Policy, said that for now, physicians should use their clinical judgment when counseling young patients on lipid disorders.
“Research on screening and treatment of lipid disorders in children and teens and the impact of these interventions have on cardiovascular disease in adults should be a high priority,” he said. “The USPSTF suggests that all children and teens eat a healthy diet, maintain a normal weight, and engage in physical activity.”
Recent estimates from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey indicate that 7.8 percent of children age 8 to 17 years have elevated levels of total cholesterol (TC) and 7.4 percent of adolescents age 12 to 19 years have elevated LDL-C, or the “bad cholesterol” that can lead to heart disease.
Four editorials related to the recommendation accompanied the report JAMA, including one from physicians from Stanford and UCSF who suggest that the U.S. health-care system should focus more on high-value solutions to major public health concerns such as climate change, poverty, obesity and gun violence.
“The need for clinicians and leaders to focus on sustainability and health-care value has never been greater, and it is likely that policy and community-based interventions will get us there much more quickly than adding more clinic-based interventions that have low value and are wasteful of resources and clinicians’ time,” they wrote.
It’s always great to see the work of one of our researchers shouted out in the New York Times. It’s even better when it becomes the scientific basis of an argument thrown into the mix of a presidential campaign.
Nicholas Kristof asserted in his column on Sunday that when women are involved in the political process and given the capacity to shape public policy, everyone benefits, particularly when it comes to health.
Kristof, who covers human rights, women’s rights, health and global affairs for the Times, wrote in his column:
Put aside your feelings about Hillary Clinton: I understand that many Americans distrust her and would welcome a woman in the White House if it were someone else. But whatever one thinks of Clinton, her nomination is a milestone, and a lesson of history is that when women advance, humanity advances.
Grant Miller of Stanford University found that when states, one by one, gave women the right to vote at the local level in the 19th and early 20th centuries, politicians scrambled to find favor with female voters and allocated more funds to public health and child health. The upshot was that child mortality rates dropped sharply and 20,000 children’s lives were saved each year.
Many of those whose lives were saved were boys. Today, some are still alive, elderly men perhaps disgruntled by the cavalcade of women at the podium in Philadelphia. But they should remember that when women gained power at the voting booth, they used it to benefit boys as well as girls.
Miller, an associate professor of medicine and core faculty member of Stanford Health Policy, first wrote about this issue in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2008, arguing that women’s choices appear to emphasize child welfare more than those of men.
He presented evidence on how state-to-state suffrage rights for U.S. women from 1869 to the adoption of the 19th Amendment in 1920, which gave all women the right to vote, helped children benefit from scientific breakthroughs.
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Simple hygienic practices — including hand and food washing, boiling water and milk, refrigerating meat and the renewed emphasis on breastfeeding — were among the most important innovations in the 19th and early 20th centuries to help protect children from often-fatal diseases such typhoid fever, smallpox, measles and scarlet fever.
As women became more and more involved in state and federal politics, Miller found, child mortality declined by 8 to 15 percent, or 20,000 fewer child deaths each year.
“Public health historians clearly link the success of hygiene campaigns to the rising influence of women,” Miller wrote, citing examples with data and graphs.
That women have been — and can be — so influential seems like a no-brainer, but it’s nice to have the science to back it up.
Bob Kocher
