MU | N e w s
Former HHS Secretary Shalala says Medicare and
Social Security help college students, too
Social Security and
Medicare are much more
than government programs
for older and disabled
Americans, Donna Shalala
told an audience March
11 at Cordier Auditorium.
They’ve changed the lives
of America’s young people,
too.
Shalala, secretary of Health
and Human Services for all
eight years of the Clinton
administration, was at
Manchester to deliver the
annual Harry ’35 and Jeanette Henney Lecture. She told the largely
student audience that Social Security and Medicare not only lifted older
Americans out of poverty, they shifted the financial responsibility of
caring for senior citizens away from their middle-aged children.
As a result, middle-class families have resources they didn’t have
before to buy homes and health insurance, and send their children
to college. “At the end of the day,” Shalala told the students, “you’re
the beneficiaries of a healthy economy, healthy people, and more
opportunities.”
Debates about Social Security, Medicare and now the Affordable Care
Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare, really come down to the role of
government in our lives, Shalala said. “It’s a fair debate.”
“My experience is that there will be a lot of fine tuning” to the ACA in
years ahead, Shalala said. Medicare needs some fixing, too, because it’s
too expensive to be sustainable in its current form, she added.
Shalala has been president of the University of Miami since 2001. She
was HHS secretary while Dr. Jane Henney ’69, who established the
Henney Lecture, served as commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration.
MU ‘an incubator’ for social change, says MLK speaker
Manchester’s commitment to peace and
social justice reaches as deep as the roots of
an oak tree. Theodore Ransaw, this year’s
Martin Luther King Jr. lecture speaker, traced
those roots in his presentation to students
Jan. 30, and challenged them to uphold their
University’s proud tradition.
Ransaw, who teaches at Michigan State
University and authored The Art of Being Cool:
The Pursuit of Black Masculinity, spoke from the
same podium that King used at Manchester
on Feb. 1, 1968. The MLK lecture is an
annual event at MU, where the civil rights icon
delivered his last campus address on “The
Future of Integration” just weeks before his
assassination.
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“How many perfect moments can you count
in your life?” asked Ransaw. “The civil rights
movement was God’s blessing of delivering
the right people for the perfect moments in
history that changed our world today.”
Manchester has been “an incubator,” Ransaw
added, for people with the courage to
speak truth to power and stand up for their
convictions. “What legacy will you hand
down?” he asked the students. “Don’t be
afraid to do the right thing at the right time.
It might be a perfect moment.”