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Dunedin Rhodes Scholar Is Focused On Health Care

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By CATHERINE DOLINSKI | The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 19, 2007

  Joseph O'Shea

TALLAHASSEE - Joseph O'Shea of Dunedin, student body president of Florida State University, is already a leader in the area of health care reform. Now he is heading to Oxford University in England as Florida's new recipient of the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship.

"I hope to spend the rest of my life resolving the inequalities in society," said O'Shea, 21 and a senior at FSU. "And I'm incredibly excited to go to Oxford University. This will be my first time abroad; I've never been out of the country."

The Rhodes Trust on Sunday announced the winners of the internationally awarded prize. This morning, FSU President T.K. Wetherell introduced O'Shea, Florida's sole Rhodes Scholar this year, to reporters at a news conference in Tallahassee. The honor will fund up to three years of study, starting in October, at Oxford, where O'Shea will concentrate on comparative social policy. He is currently an honors student at FSU with majors in philosophy and interdisciplinary social sciences with a 4.0 grade-point average.

O'Shea, who also is a Truman Scholar, founded a free health clinic in New Orleans' lower Ninth Ward and has led a coalition to reform health care in Leon County. He began his line of volunteer work, he said, as a volunteer at the Clearwater Free Clinic.

"That was certainly an eye-opener," he said. "You can spend a lot of time reading about inequities in health care, lack of access to health care in American systems. But it's a lot different to see it yourself and have to face people struggling to pay and listen to their stories and try to find a place for them in the health care system in this little niche, in this little tiny clinic in Clearwater.

"It revealed to me … that there were a lot of people who needed help and who couldn't get it in America. And I thought a just society wouldn't allow this to happen because, for the most part, it wasn't any fault of their own."

He looks forward, he said, to using the Rhodes Scholarship as "a means to an end," which in his case will be to observe and research health care and social programs in other countries for possible solutions to problems in the United States.

O'Shea's father died last spring after battling polycystic kidney disease for a little more than four years. Today, the scholar is candid about the effect of his father's disease on his own drive to improve health care, particularly for the underprivileged.

"My father passed away but he was sick for many years before that," he said. "It forced a lot of changes in my family, and it developed a sense of empathy and humility, and the idea that much of what happens in our lives is just simply a matter of luck."

O'Shea, whose three siblings also attend FSU, said he expects to run for a political office one day. The Democrat said he is supporting Illinois Sen. Barack Obama for president in 2008.

O'Shea was one of 32 U.S. students named Rhodes Scholars this year, selected from 764 applicants. He is the third Rhodes Scholar in FSU's history.

Reporter Catherine Dolinski can be reached at (850) 222-8382 or cdolinski@tampatrib.com.

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