Debbie lives in New York City. She has worked for many years to promote equitable access to health care and to reduce health care costs. Since the pandemic hit, she has been active with several groups promoting multi-layered prevention to stop transmission of COVID, speaking up as a public health professional, as a concerned community member, and as someone with Long COVID.
She earned her A.B. at Harvard, and a masters degree in public health (Health Services) at Boston University. For over 20 years, while a director of the Health Reform Program at the Boston University School of Public Health, she co-authored numerous analyses of health care cost and access problems, ways to make universal coverage and prescription drugs affordable, the risks of hospital closings, and related issues, for Massachusetts, New York, and the nation. Earlier, Debbie was a rank-and-file union organizer and then worked to promote access to prenatal and other care at the Mayor's Committee on Access to Health Care in Boston.
In recent years, she was a longtime family caregiver for her frail, disabled husband and very elderly parents. Before the vaccine was easily accessible, Debbie's mother caught it and died, and Debbie too got it -- an extremely mild case, but with long-lasting effects on her stamina.
In the pandemic, her first focus was on the urgent need to provide masks and other protection for New York's thousands of home care aides. Debbie believes passionately that all workers have a right to workplaces that are as COVID-safe as possible, everyone should be able to seek medical care without great and avoidable risk of exposure to a dangerous virus, and widespread multi-layered prevention efforts could save countless lives.
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