(Posted January 24, 2011)

HUNTINGDON, Pa. -- Robert Saldin, a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research at Harvard University, will give a lecture at Juniata College, "Wonder Drug or Bad Medicine? A Short History of Obamacare and its Prognosis for the Future," at 7:30 p.m., Monday, Jan. 31, in Neff Lecture Hall in the von Liebig Center for Science on the Juniata campus.

The lecture is free and open to the public. Saldin's talk is sponsored by the Juniata College Department of Politics.

Was the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act a prescription for the Democratic defeat? And amid calls for repeal, what is the prognosis for its survival?

There is perhaps no more volatile hot-button issue than health care reform, an observation brought home by the 2010 election that President Barack Obama called a "shellacking." Was the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act a prescription for the Democratic defeat? And amid calls for repeal, what is the prognosis for its survival?

At Harvard, Saldin is studying American health policy, with a focus on aging and end-of-life care.

Saldin will be at Harvard through 2012 as a scholar-in-residence at the institute for Quantitative Social Science. After his stint at the institute, he will return to the University of Montana, where he is an assistant professor in the political science department.

In addition to his interest in health policy, Saldin also specializes in how war has affected politics in the modern era. He recently published "War, the American State, and Politics since 1898," published by Cambridge University Press.

Saldin earned a bachelor's degree in 2000 in political science from Davidson College in Davidson, N.C. He went on to earn a doctoral degree in politics in 2008 from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Va. He has been a political science professor at the University of Montana since 2008.

He was named a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley from 2005 to 2007, and was a fellow at Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs for the 2006-2007 academic year.

Saldin also was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins University for the 2007-2008 academic year.

His research has been published in such journals as the Journal of Policy History, Journal of Politics, Political Science and politics and White House Studies. Saldin has also published opinion pieces in the Huffington Post, the New York Daily News and Roll Call.

At Montana, Saldin has taught such courses as Political Parties and Elections, and courses on The Presidency, Congress and Environmental Politics.

Contact April Feagley at feaglea@juniata.edu or (814) 641-3131 for more information.