Lawrence D. Brown Ph.D.
Professor
Department of Health Policy and Management
Columbia University
Email: ldb3@columbia.edu
Discipline: Political Science, Health Policy
Expertise: Insurance, Organization of Care, Politics and Policymaking
Investigator Award 
Expanding Arenas: A Political History of Modern U.S. Health PolicyAward Year: 2004 Lawrence D. Brown, Ph.D. explores the political and historical forces that have shaped the federal government's growing role in health care delivery and financing since 1945. In his Investigator Award project, Expanding Arenas: A Political History of Modern U.S. Health Policy, Dr. Brown examines the rise and evolution of four policy "arenas" that he uses to categorize federal interventions in health care: subsidy, financing, reorganization, and regulation. In an era often described as the end of "big government," Dr. Brown aims to explain why government's role in health care continues to grow and to assess the prospects for health care reform in light of the political forces and obstacles that all reform proposals face.
Background 
Lawrence D. Brown is professor of health policy and management in the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. A political scientist, he received a Ph.D. in Government at Harvard University in 1973. After positions at Harvard, the Brookings Institution, and the University of Michigan, in 1988 he came to Columbia, where he chaired the Department of Health Policy and Management for ten years and the university's Public Policy Consortium for three years. He is the author of Politics and Health Care Organization: HMOs as Federal Policy (Brookings Institution, 1983) and of articles on the political dimensions of community cost containment, expansion of coverage for the uninsured, national health reform, the role of analysis in the formation of health policy, and cross-national health policy. Dr. Brown edited the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law for five years, has served on several national advisory committees for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, has an RWJF Investigators in Health Policy Research award, and is a member of the Institute of Medicine.
- Brown, L.D. Arenas in the Mosaic of Health Policy, In Health Politics and Policy, 4th Edition, eds. Morone, J.A., Litman, T.J., Robins, L.S. Delmar Cengage Learning, 2008.
- Brown, L.D. The More Things Stay the Same the More They Change: The Odd Interplay between Government and Ideology in the Recent Political History of the U.S. Health Care System, In History and Health Policy in the United States: Putting the Past Back In
- Brown, L.D. Incrementalism Adds Up? In Healthy, Wealthy and Fair: Health Care for a Good Society, eds. Brown, L.D., Jacobs, L., Morone, J. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
- Brown, L.D. The Amazing Noncollapsing U.S. Health Care System: Is Reform Finally at Hand? NEJM, 2008, 358(4): 325-7.
- Janus, K., Brown, L.D. Medicare as Incubator for Innovation in Payment Policy. JHPPL, 2007, 32(2): 293-306.
- Brown, L.D. Book Review Symposium on James Morone's Hellfire Nation: Puritans All. JHPPL, 2006, 31(2): 345-54.
- Gelijns, A.C., Brown, L.D., Magnell, C., Ronchi, E., Moskowitz, A.J. Evidence, Politics, and Technological Change. Health Affairs, 2005, 24(1): 29-40.