2008-10-10 19:57:01 -

- Illustrator Barry Blitt does it again... and again.

Blitt, who drew so much attention in July for his satirical and controversial New Yorker cover illustration of Barack and Michelle Obama, created the cover for the new issue of Stanford Medicine magazine on politics and health care. The illustration depicts a female patient looking up at presidential nominees Barack

Obama and John McCain standing at her bedside in physician's garb. Her skeptical look says: "Show me. What are you going to do on health-care reform?"

In fact, Blitt actually created two covers. Because the magazine's cover flap obscures the face of the candidate on the left, the magazine's editors decided to print two covers--half of the magazine's run has Obama on the left and the other half has McCain there.

The content inside is just as powerful. The issue includes:

-- A pair of articles on paths to reform by two leading health-care advocates, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich.

-- Nobel laureate Roger Kornberg's warning about the danger of declining federal funding for basic research and its impact on science and prosperity.

-- A look at polling data and voter trends by Kaiser Family Foundation's CEO, Drew Altman.

-- A Q&A with Safeway's CEO, Steven Burd, an unlikely reform evangelist, explaining why universal health care makes good business sense.

-- An open letter to the next president on keeping science policy clean of ideology from Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science.

-- A reality check on McCain's and Obama's plans to fix the health-care mess.

-- A political play-by-play of California's ill-fated bid for universal health care, including comments from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on why he won't give up on the dream.

-- A look at reform's greatest enemy: the Washington health-care lobby.

Also of note:

-- A feature on Stanford's 40 years of heart transplants, from the first successful such surgery in the United States, through the legal gray zones and medical uncertainties of the early days, to today, when more than 70,000 worldwide have had the procedure.

-- An exploration of the repercussions of the push by the National Institutes of Health to bring down the cost of sequencing a human's genome to $1,000 a pop.

The magazine, including Web-only features, is available online at stanmed.stanford.edu. To request the print version, call (650) 723-6911.

Stanford University Medical Center integrates research, medical education and patient care at its three institutions -- Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford Hospital & Clinics and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford. For more information, please visit the Web site of the medical center's Office of Communication & Public Affairs at mednews.stanford.edu.

Stanford University Medical Center
Print Media Contact:
Susan Ipaktchian, 650-725-5375
susani@stanford.edu
Broadcast Media Contact:
M.A. Malone, 650-723-6912
mamalone@stanford.edu