A hard-charging doctor on Obama's team

Ezekiel J. Emanuel, MD, serves a special adviser to President Obama's budget director, Peter R. Orszag. He is also the older brother of Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff. For two decades, Emanuel has been writing about how to guarantee healthcare for all. In White House discussions on health policy, he emphasizes the need to slash co-payments for preventive care and insists that patients should be able to keep their doctors even if they change insurance plans. He also brings to the White House a physician's perspective, which was generally missing from the last big effort to overhaul healthcare in 1993-94.