Princeton University sociologist and healthcare policy expert Paul Starr is the author of Remedy and Reaction: The Peculiar American Struggle over Health Care Reform. Before giving a talk on America’s century-long healthcare wars, he answered questions in the green room about his lucky number and his obituary-and, unprompted, revealed that although none of his and his wife’s seven children is a doctor, his stepson Rhys Coiro plays one on TV’s A Gifted Man.
Q. You edited a book on the politics of numbers. Do you have a lucky number?
A. I don’t know that I have a lucky number. When I was growing up in New York, Mickey Mantle had number seven on the Yankees, so if there was any number I had special feeling, for it must’ve been number seven.
Q. What’s the greatest thing to come out of New Jersey?
A. New Jersey has 9 million people, and last year I was visiting Vienna, and I learned that Austria has 9 million people, and it occurred to me that Trenton compares very unfavorably to Vienna … So I don’t know. Bruce Springsteen I guess-what else?
Q. What is the best gift you’ve given someone recently?
A. My wife thinks her iPad is fantastic.
Q. What’s your favorite cocktail?
A. I prefer red wine.
Q. Where do you get your news?
A. More from The New York Times and Washington Post than anyplace else.
Q. What makes you laugh?
A. Great cartoons, stories, and my grandchildren. My daughter has one-year-old twins.
Q. How do you amuse yourself in the doctor’s waiting room?
A. Fortunately I haven’t had to spend a lot of time in doctor’s waiting rooms. Reading magazines.
Q. What’s the last great book you read?
A. I’m in the middle of The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker, and I do think that is a great book.
Q. If the first paragraph of your obituary will be your Pulitzer Prize, what does the second paragraph say?
A. Well I hope to do something of significance besides winning the Pulitzer Prize. [You think it’s yet to come?] I hope so. I hope the second paragraph is not that I was part of the team that formulated the failed Clinton health plan.
Q. Where would you like to travel to next?
A. A year and a half ago my wife and I were going to Paris, and she left on an earlier flight that turned out to be the last flight to Paris because of the volcano eruption in Iceland. I never made it. I’m still waiting for that trip to Paris.
Q. Are you good at keeping secrets?
A. Yes-for how long?
*Photo by Aaron Salcido.