Marshall W. Raffel is Professor Emeritus of Health Policy and Administration at Penn State University. He has acted as a consultant on health care planning and reform at both the state level and the federal level in the United States and in Southeast Asia, Poland, the Czech Republic, the Slovak Republic, and Hungary. He is co-author (with Norma K. Raffel) of The U.S. Health Care System: Origins and Functions and Comparative Health Systems: Descriptive Analyses of Fourteen National Health Systems (Penn State, 1984).