Nancy DeParle
She served as the director of the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) from 1997 to 2000, administering the Medicare program for the Clinton administration, and before then worked at the Office of Management and Budget. On March 2, 2009, she was named by President Obama to serve as "health reform Czar", or director of the new White House Office of Health Reform
Earlier in her career, DeParle served in the Cabinet of Tennessee Governor Ned McWherter as Commissioner of Human Services. She has also worked as a lawyer in private practice.
As the child of Chinese immigrants in Tennessee, she ended up attending the University of Tennesse, winning a Rhodes Scholarship, giving her a degree from Oxford to go along with the one she'd get from Harvard Law School.
A public plan is something that’s sponsored by the government, and therefore has very low or almost nonexistent administrative costs (RIGHT!), compared to others. It doesn’t have the need to have brokers out selling; it wouldn’t have the need to have a lot of costs and profits, the way private plans would. So it has that advantage. It could operate by the same rules that all the other plans do; it could have payments rates that are very similar. Or it could have payment rates that are the same as Medicare — that’s one idea that’s been used. So there are various ways of looking at it.
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An attorney running our health care system?!