Steffie Woolhandler

Stephanie Joan "Steffie" Woolhandler (born 1951 in Shreveport, Louisiana) is an American primary care physician and medical researcher. An advocate for single-payer healthcare in the United States, she is a co-founder and board member of Physicians for a National Health Program. She is a distinguished professor of public health and health policy at the CUNY School of Public Health at Hunter College and an adjunct clinical professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. She is also a lecturer in medicine at Harvard Medical School, where she formerly co-directed the general internal medicine internship program.

Woolhandler received her bachelor's degree from Stanford University; her medical degree from Louisiana State University; and her master's degree from the University of California, Berkeley.

Woolhandler joined the faculty at Harvard in 1987. From 1990 to 1991, she worked at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation as a health policy fellow at the Institute of Medicine and the U.S. Congress.

Woolhandler has published more than 50 papers on the subjects of health policy, administrative overhead, the uninsured, health care access and financing.

Woolhandler was named the Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellow for the Institute of Medicine in 1990. In 1994, she received the Edward K. Barsky Award from the Physicians Forum, and in 1996 the Ethical Culture Society named her "Humanist of the Year." In 2009, she received that year's A. Clifford Barger Excellence in Mentoring Award from Harvard.