Health Affairs, 26, no. 6 (2007): 1525-1526 doi: 10.1377/hlthaff.26.6.1525 © 2007 by Project HOPE	New Online   New Issue: China & India   Obesity In China   Pay Cuts For Medicare Docs   Access To Care Woes

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Foreword

Steering Through Tricky Waters: Health Affairs At 25

Bill Walsh was the founder of Project HOPE, whose hospital ship S.S. HOPE, staffed by volunteer American doctors and nurses, sailed the world’s oceans between 1960 and 1974, bringing succor to patients in desperately poor countries and training local health workers there to do the same. Although continuing Project HOPE’s international mission—for example, by building state-of-the-art hospitals in developing and Eastern European countries—Bill also developed a keen interest in U.S. domestic health policy. Those of us who knew him as a personal friend during the 1970s and 1980s recall his frustration with the often dubious folklore on which U.S. health policy proceeded at that time. The problem was not only a lack of robust data. Bill also was frustrated with a scholarly literature predominantly written in the turgid style that might garner academic tenure but would make a policymaker’s eyes glaze over. Visionary once again, Bill dreamed of a journal that could serve as a bridge between academic scholarship and health policymakers in the trenches. With a penchant for excellence and a keen instinct for finding it in people, Bill tapped as his founding editor John Iglehart.

John was then serving as a vice president of the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and director of its Washington office; he was better known to health services researchers as a former star journalist and editor at the National Journal, focusing on U.S. health policy. He was also an active member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, and a correspondent of the New England Journal of Medicine, for which over the years he has penned more than 100 penetrating essays on issues in U.S. health care policy.

Bill and John took the prestigious Foreign Affairs as a rough guide for the physical appearance of their new journal. They decided early on that papers in the journal would have to pass rigorous peer review but also be written in a style easily accessible to busy policymakers in government and the private sector. Furthermore, although himself staunchly conservative in his political views, Bill agreed that the journal would be strictly nonideological, which he took to mean that it would not have a slant toward either political party, to either the public or the private sector, or to either not-for-profit or for-profit institutions. No one was better equipped than was John Iglehart to steer the new ship Health Affairs impeccably through the sometimes tricky waters begotten by these multiple requirements.

The first issue of Health Affairs appeared in the winter of 1981; the rest of the story is by now well-known history. Under the stewardship of John, executive editor Don Metz, and executive publisher Jane Hiebert-White, with the support of Project HOPE and of many other foundations and business firms; and by the sweat of a loyal, dedicated, exquisitely competent staff, Health Affairs has become what the Washington Post has called the "bible of health policy." One routinely sees members of Congress and their staffers bring copies of Health Affairs to conferences and quote from it on panels, and one finds copies of Health Affairs on the desks or bookshelves of colleagues around the world. Although Americans sometimes brag a tad too much about their own institutions in the global scheme of things, I have no doubt that scholars and health policymakers around the world would agree that Health Affairs is "world class" in every sense of that term. I view it as a great personal privilege to have worked with Health Affairs ever since its founding: on the editorial board, as an author, and occasionally as an informal sounding board for John.

When my wife, May, decided to organize a conference at Princeton University immediately upon the release of the Clinton health plan in 1994, she persuaded John to become her co-entrepreneur in organizing on short notice two such conferences as forums in which "policy wonks" and congressional staffers from both parties could forthrightly trade perspectives, in a cordial manner, for the good of the country. Fostering that style of discourse in American health policy has been John Iglehart’s trademark and lasting contribution to our nation.

May and I wish John "fu ru dong hai; shou bi nan shan," which means, "Blessing as wide and deep as the East Sea; Longevity as high as the South Mountain." Any Chinese will tell you that this is as good as it gets.

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