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Keynote Speakers
SUNDAY, April 22, 2007 - 3 to 5 p.m.
 VAL J. HALAMANDARIS, JD
President, National Association for Home Care & Hospice
Val J. Halamandaris was named President of the National Association for Home Care & Hospice on its birthday, March 10, 1982. For the past 25 years, he has guided the organization to become one of the most respected in Washington, D.C. Under his direction, NAHC has helped raise public awareness and the acceptance of home care and hospice from 10 percent to more than 80 percent of the U.S. public.
These gains were possible because Halamandaris recruited a top flight staff that has increased from one to 55. He helped unify the industry and NAHC membership increased from 200 to more than 5,000 organizations.
Under his leadership, NAHC has enjoyed unprecedented success in Congress, having garnered support from both parties, including conservatives and liberals alike. In 2004, Halamandaris was chosen to make the keynote speech before the National Governors Association, which resulted in the NGA naming long term care as the number one problem facing America, and pointing to home care as the best solution for it.
Halamandaris is a native of the state of Utah. He worked his way through college on the staff of Senator Frank E. Moss, and continued working full time as he completed his law degree from Catholic University Law School. He served as Counsel to the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging and the U.S. House Select Committee on Aging. In a Congressional career that spanned 20 years, he helped write the Medicare and Medicaid home health benefits into law, authored the first Medicare hospice bill and helped guide it through Congress, helped create federal minimum standards for nursing homes, created the Office of Inspector General in the Department of Health and Human Services, created Medicaid fraud units, made fraud against Medicare and Medicaid a felony, outlawed kickbacks among Medicare and Medicaid providers, and helped create the National Institute on Aging and the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases at the National Institutes of Health.
Halamandaris is something of a Renaissance man. In addition to being a trade association executive, he is an attorney, author, publisher, editor, producer of films for television, a published photographer and a humanitarian.
Since coming to NAHC, he founded The Caring Institute, The Frederick Douglass Museum, The Foundation for Hospice and Home Care, The Center for Health Care Law, CARING Magazine, and The World Home Care and Hospice Organization. Most recently, he helped found the Home Care Technology Association of America, the Private Duty Homecare Association of America and the Home Care and Hospice Financial Managers Association.
Congressman Claude Pepper (D-FL) said he was "the best person he had worked with in his more than 50 years of government service." He has won more than his share of awards, including the National Ellis Island Award in 2003. He has been one of the nation’s most acknowledged experts on the U.S. Congress and in the fields of health care and aging for more than 40 years.
MONDAY, April 23, 2007 - 8:30 to 9:30 a.m.
 DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN,
Pulitzer Prize-winning Author, Presidential Historian
Doris Kearns Goodwin, world-renowned historian, has been reporting on politics and baseball for over two decades. Goodwin is the author of several books and has written for leading national publications. She is a commentator for NBC, and a consultant and on-air person for PBS documentaries on Lyndon B. Johnson, the Kennedy Family, Franklin Roosevelt, and Ken Burns’ The History of Baseball. She was also the first female journalist to enter the Red Sox locker room.
Goodwin received her B.A. from Colby College, where she graduated Magna Cum Laude. While at Colby, she was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, the international honor society. She received her Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University. She taught government, including a course on the American Presidency. Following her tenure at Harvard, Goodwin served as an assistant to Lyndon Johnson in his last year in the White House. She later assisted Johnson in the preparation of his memoirs.
In 1976, Goodwin authored Lyndon Johnson & The American Dream, which became a New York Times best seller. She followed up in 1987 with the political biography, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, which stayed on the New York Times Best Seller List for five months. In 1990, that book was made into a six-hour ABC miniseries. Her next book, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The American Home Front During World War II, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in April 1995, as well as the Harold Washington Literary Award, the New England Bookseller Association Award, the Ambassador Book Award, and the Washington Monthly Book Award. It was a New York Times best seller for six months.
Goodwin’s book, Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir, published in 1997, is about growing up in the 1950s in love with the Brooklyn Dodgers. It has been a New York Times best seller, as well as a Book of the Month Club selection. A Washington Post reviewer wrote, "This is a book in the grand tradition of girlhood memoirs, dating from Louisa May Alcott to Carson McCullers and Harper Lee." It has been optioned for a musical.
Her most recent work, a monumental history of Abraham Lincoln entitled Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, published in October 2005, joined the best-seller lists on its first week in publication, and soon reached #1 on the New York Times Best Seller List. Team of Rivals won the 2006 Lincoln Prize for an outstanding work about the president and/or the Civil War, and the inaugural New York Historical Society Book Prize. Steven Spielberg is developing a feature film about the book, set to star Liam Neeson as Lincoln.
Goodwin is married to Richard Goodwin, who worked in the White House under both Kennedy and Johnson. Mr. Goodwin’s experience as the investigator who uncovered the quiz show scandals of the 1950s was captured in the Academy Award-nominated movie Quiz Show, directed by Robert Redford. Goodwin has three sons. |
