Former Democratic majority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives and Northwestern alumnus Dick Gephardt returned to campus Tuesday to discuss global health care reform.
Gephardt, who represented Missouri’s 3rd District in Congress, was invited by the Kellogg Innovation Network as the keynote speaker for their “Leveraging ‘Unnatural’ Partnerships for Innovation Success” event at the Allen Center.
Since his retirement from politics in 2008, Gephardt has been working to improve collaboration in global health care.
“If you look at the cost for drug development, you can tell that the current economic model just doesn’t work,” Gephardt said. “Drugs need to be taken through a long, expensive testing process, and 90 percent of what we start fails anyway. We need more collaboration between private entities to reduce risk and cost.”
Gephardt’s career in politics began at NU, where he was president of Beta Theta Pi, the student senate and his freshman class. He graduated from NU in 1962.
In 1986 Gephardt helped develop SEMATECH, a company which rescued failing companies affected by the health care industry’s then-plummeting shares.
Since his retirement, Gephardt has run his own lobbying firm in Washington. His interest in medical innovation, he said, is that it lends itself to private-public sector collaboration.
“I’m always a believer that if something worked in the past, we should look at that again,” Gephardt said. “We’re at a watershed moment in medical innovation, and collaboration between all sectors is key.”
