The draft dominated my life choices. I had already joined the Air Force ROTC before the lottery, so I could go to graduate school at UCLA. After the lottery, where I got a very bad number, I ended up leaving ROTC and going into the Public Health Service as a Lieutenant and moving to Rockville, MD for two years in the middle of graduate school. This was the uniformed services and it counted as military service. I was working with the National Center for Health Services Research and Development, which has since morphed into the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality. During this time, my oldest son was born at Bethesda Naval Hospital. When I left, I went into the inactive reserve. I ended up spending most of my career on the economics of health care–still a major area of my research, writing and policy analysis.
