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About Richard Lamm

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Health Policy Analyst and
Former Colorado Governor

"Redrawing the Health Care Map"

Wednesday, March 3
5:45 p.m.
Levin Hall
UTMB Campus

Richard D. Lamm is Director of the Center for Public Policy & Contemporary Issues at the University of Denver. He is one of a new breed of policy analysts who argues that the challenge of the 1990’s is to meet new public needs with ever more limited resources. "Public policy," he maintains, "cannot count on historic revenue growth and, thus, cannot chase geometric curves of public spending." Lamm moves beyond traditional liberalism and conservatism to urge that the task before us is "to reconceptualize much of what government does and how it does it."

Lamm has always been on the cutting edge of political change. As a first year legislator, he drafted and succeeded in passing the nation’s first liberalized abortion law. He was an early leader of the environmental movement. Reacting to the high cost of campaigning, he walked the state in his campaign for Governor of Colorado. Lamm was elected to three terms as Colorado’s top elected official, and in serving as Governor from January 1975 to January 1987, he was the longest-serving Governor in Colorado’s history. During the summer of 1996, Lamm was a contender for the presidential nomination of the Reform Party, and as a candidate, led the national discussion on immigration, the budget deficit, Social Security, and campaign reform.

Lamm was selected as on of Time Magazine’s "200 Young Leaders of American" in 1974, and won the Christian Science Monitor "Peace 2020" essay in 1985. In 1992, he was honored by the Denver Post and Historic Denver, Inc. as one of the "Colorado 100" -- people who made significant contributions to Colorado and made lasting impressions on the state’s history. He was Chairman of the Pew Health Professions Commission, and a public member of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education.

During 1996, Lamm appeared on virtually every national news program, including Larry King Live and Inside Politics (CNN), Today (NBC), Meet the Press (NBC), ABC’s Good Morning America, Lehrer News Hour (PBS), and CBS’s Face the Nation. His editorials have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Newsday, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune, as well as in a number of academic and medical journals. While Governor, Lamm wrote or co-authored six books: A California Conspiracy, with Arnold Grossman (St. Martin’s Press, 1988); Megatraumas: America in the Year 2000 (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1985), The Immigration Time Bomb: The Fragmenting of America, with Gary Imhoff (Dutton and Company, 1985), 1988, with Arnie Grossman (St. Martin’s Press, 1985), Pioneers & Politicians, with Duane A. Smith (Pruett Publishing Company, 1984) and The Angry West, with Michael McCarthy (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1982).

The Center for Public Policy & Contemporary Issues advances UD’s commitment to the study and discussion of American society’s most critical issues. Research produced by the Center is targeted at influential policy makers nationwide. The Center contributes to the national policy dialogue through an active program of conferences, seminars, courses, forums, and several monograph series. It also grants degrees in public policy through its Public Affairs Program, an interdisciplinary, honors-based program designed to create analytical skills that can be applied to public policy questions through courses involving virtually every major social issue.