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Biographical Sketches
 Georges C. Benjamin, M.D., FACP
Georges
Benjamin is well-known in the world of public health as a leader,
practitioner, and administrator. Benjamin has been the Executive
Director of the American Public Health Association (APHA), the nation's
oldest and largest organization of public health professionals, since
December 2002. Prior to joining APHA, he was the Chief Executive
of the State of Maryland's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene,
a cabinet-level agency with a $5 billion budget. Benjamin also served
as Acting Health Commissioner for the District of Columbia. Benjamin
is a member of several committees, including the U.S. Department
of Health and Human Services secretary's advisory committee on public
health preparedness and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
director's advisory committee. He also serves on the boards of Research
America, Partnership for Prevention, and Advocates for Highway and
Auto Safety. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National
Academies of Science. Dr. Benjamin is a graduate of the Illinois
Institute of Technology and the University of Illinois College of
Medicine. He is board-certified in internal medicine and is a fellow
of the American College of Physicians.
 Jonathan
Blum, M.P.P.
Jonathan Blum is Director of the Medicaid Practice
at The Health Strategies Consultancy, LLC. The Medicaid Practice
closely monitors State and Federal policy changes related to the
Medicaid prescription drug benefit, dual eligibility, disease management,
and other Medicaid program issues. Prior to joining Health Strategies,
Mr. Blum served on the professional staff of the Senate Finance Committee.
While at the Committee, Mr. Blum advised members of Congress and
their staffs on Medicare prescription drug and reform issues. He
played an integral role in the development and drafting of the Medicare
Modernization Act of 2003. Prior to working for the Committee, Mr.
Blum was an Analyst with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
While at OMB, Mr. Blum advised OMB and White House policy officials
on Medicare payment policy. Mr. Blum earned a bachelor’s degree.
from the University of Pennsylvania and a master's degree in Public
policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
 Randall
R. Bovbjerg, J.D.
Randy Bovbjerg is a Principal Research Associate
in the Health Policy Center of The Urban Institute. During 30 years
of work in health policy, one specialty has been medical injury,
malpractice, and reform. His recent projects have included assessing
State medical boards’ discipline of physicians, considering “transparency” in
disclosing injuries as a hospital strategy for risk management and
quality, assessing large physician group’s efforts to prevent
medical injury, and evaluation of alternative compensation systems
in Virginia and Florida for severely injured newborns. His first
health policy publication was a 1975 Duke Law Journal article
on HMOs and malpractice, the most recent an essay on malpractice
reform
in the Journal of Legal Medicine. He also drafted chapter
6 of the Institute of Medicine's 2000 book To Err Is Human.
He has studied prevention of medical injury, tort reform, and nonjudicial
alternatives,
along with many other topics in health policy. He serves on JCAHO’s
task force on alternatives to tort litigation, served on the DC Health
Care Reform Commission, and has taught for Duke and Johns Hopkins
Universities. Previously, he was a State insurance regulator in Massachusetts.
 Bram
B. Briggance, M.A., Ph.D.
Bram Briggance joined the University of California,
San Francisco Center for Health the Professions in February 2000.
As Program Director, his responsibilities include the direct management
and coordination of several workforce research and leadership projects.
His published work ranges from profession-specific workforce profiles
to broad, polemical essays addressing health care reform. In addition
to his research and administrative activities, Dr. Briggance serves
as the Center’s Communication Director. He received his B.A.
from Denison University and his master’s and doctorate degrees
from the Department of Philosophy at Stony Brook University.
 Robert
E. Hurley, Ph.D.
Bob Hurley is a faculty member in the Department
of Health Administration at the Virginia Commonwealth University.
He has been teaching and conducting research in managed care and
other health care issues for more than 20 years. Dr. Hurley has also
given more 300 presentations related to health care management and
health policy around the country to a wide variety of audiences including
State legislatures and the U.S. Senate. He has presented at 35 of
AHRQ’s ULP programs. His research and evaluation work has been
supported by several Federal and State government agencies and by
a number of private foundations. Dr. Hurley is a Senior Research
Consultant to the Center Studying Health System Change and Chair
of the National Review Committee of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
Medicaid Managed Care Program. He serves on the editorial boards
of Medical Care Research & Review, Health Affairs, Milbank Quarterly,
Managed Care Quarterly, and Health Administration Press. Dr. Hurley
received his doctorate in health policy and administration from the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill-School of Public Health.
 Brent
C. James, M.D., M.Stat.
Dr. Brent James is Intermountain Health Care’s
(IHC) Vice President for Medical Research and Executive Director
of its Institute for Health Care Delivery Research and leads IHC's
clinical improvement efforts. IHC is widely recognized for its work
in clinical quality improvement and electronic clinical decision
support systems. An interest in cancer led him to spend several years
with the American College of Surgeons, where he helped support the
Commission on Cancer and designed and staffed the College's first
in-house mainframe computer system. He later served as a Biostatistician
in the Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group while an Assistant Professor
in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public
Health.
Dr. James presently holds joint Adjunct Professorships in
the University of Utah School of Medicine's Department of Family
and Preventive
Medicine and the Department of Medical Informatics. He is a Visiting
Lecturer in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the
Harvard School of Public Health and an Adjunct Professor at Tulane
University. He serves on the Institute of Medicine's National Roundtable
on Healthcare Quality and its Committee on Quality of Healthcare
in America. He is a member of the National Quality Forum’s
Strategic Framework Board, and sits on the Board of Trustees of the
National Patient Safety Foundation. He serves on a number of other
boards for not-for-profit health care institutions with missions
directed at measuring and improving the quality and availability
of health care services. Dr. James received an undergraduate degree
in computer science, a master’s of statistics, and a medical
degree from the University of Utah, with subsequent training in general
surgery from that institution.
 Martha
King
Martha King directs the Health Program at the
National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL). She has been with
NCSL’s Denver office for 19 years, working on a variety of
health issues. Before joining NCSL, Martha worked as research staff
for the Colorado legislature for 7 years. As a Peace Corps volunteer,
she spent 2 years in South Korea working on rural tuberculosis control.
She double-majored in biology and psychology at Swarthmore College
and holds master’s degrees in public administration and social
work from the University of Denver.
 Rachel
B. Morgan, R.N., B.S.N.
Rachel Morgan is a Senior Policy Specialist in
State-Federal Relations at the National Conference of State Legislatures
(NCSL) where she works directly with the Federal Affairs Counsel & Senior
Committee Director for the Standing Committee on Health. Her responsible
includes analysis and tracking of Federal activity on health issues
affecting States. Ms. Morgan is a nurse with more than 20 years experience
in public and community health, nurse case management and managed
care. She has supervised both community and public health programs
in multiple States across the country. Her extensive experience with
managed care organizations includes the direction of health
services for a large physician hospital organization with oversight
and development responsibilities for nurse case management and utilization
review programs servicing Medicaid and indigent populations in the
Washington D.C. metropolitan area.
Ms. Morgan came to NCSL from George Washington University Medical
Faculty Associates where she had coordinated various managed care
activities
for the large medical specialty group including insurance contracting
and group compliance with plan operations. Ms. Morgan holds a Bachelor
of Science degree in Nursing from Jacksonville State University in
Alabama, a diploma in nursing from Fort Sanders School of Nursing
in Knoxville, Tennessee and has completed graduate work in health
service administration with Central Michigan University in Honolulu
Hawaii. She also holds certificates in nurse case management, quality
management and high-risk obstetrical nursing. She has been with NCSL
for over four years.
 John
E. McDonough, Dr.P.H.
John E. McDonough is Executive Director of Health
Care for All, Massachusetts’ leading consumer health advocacy
organization. From 1998 through 2003, he was an Associate Professor
at the Heller School, Brandeis University, and a Senior Associate
at its Schneider Institute for Health Policy. From 1985 to 1997,
he served as a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives,
where he co-chaired the Joint Committee on Health Care. In 1996,
he led the successful campaign for passage of health access legislation
to cover uninsured children, funded by new tobacco taxes, legislation
that served as a model for the Federal Children’s Health Insurance
Program.
Dr. McDonough teaches at the Harvard School of Public Health and
the Boston University School of Public Health. His articles have
appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine, Health
Affairs and
other journals. He has written two books, Experiencing Politics:
A Legislator’s Stories of Government and Health Care by the
University of California Press and the Milbank Fund in 2000, and
Interests, Ideas, and Deregulation: The Fate of Hospital Rate
Setting by the University of Michigan Press in 1997. He received a doctorate
in public health from the School of Public Health at the University
of Michigan in 1996 and a master’s in public administration
from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard in 1990.
 Len
M. Nichols, Ph.D.
Len Nichols is the Director of the Health Policy
Program at the New America Foundation. Dr. Nichols moved to the New
America Foundation after serving as Vice President at the Center
for Studying Health System Change for almost four years. His research
focuses on policy inferences. Previously, Dr. Nichols was a Principal
Research Associate at the Urban Institute, Senior Advisor for
Health Policy at the Office of Management and Budget, (OMB), a visiting
Public Health Service Fellow at the Agency for Healthcare Research
and Quality (AHRQ), and an associate professor and chair of the Economics
Department at Wellesley College, where he taught from 1980 to 1991.
Dr. Nichols has served as a member of the Competitive Pricing Advisory
Commission (CPAC) for the U.S. Medicare program and as a member of
the Technical Review Panel for the Medicare Trustees Reports. He
has also recently been a consultant to the World Bank, the InterAmerican
Development Bank, and the Pan American Health Organization. He
earned his doctorate in economics from the University of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign.
 Kenneth
E. Thorpe, Ph.D.
Kenneth Thorpe is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor
and Chair of the Department of Health Policy & Management, in
the Rollins School of Public Health of Emory University. He also
directs the Emory Center on Health Outcomes and Quality. He has held
appointments at Tulane University, the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill, Columbia University, and was Director of the Program
on Health Care Financing and Insurance at the Harvard University
School of Public Health. Dr. Thorpe was Deputy Assistant Secretary
for Health Policy in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
from 1993 to 1995. He also directed the administration’s estimation
efforts in dealing with Congressional health care reform proposals
during the 103rd and 104th sessions of Congress. In 1991 Dr.
Thorpe was awarded the Young Investigator Award presented to the
most promising health services researcher in the country under age
40 by the Association for Health Services Research. He has authored
and co-authored over 80 articles, book chapters and books and is
a frequent national presenter on issues of health care financing,
insurance and health care reform at health care conferences, television,
and the media. Dr. Thorpe received his doctorate from the Rand
Graduate School, a masters’s degree from Duke University,
and his bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan.
 Grace-Marie
Turner, Ph.D.
Grace-Marie Turner is President of the Galen Institute,
a public policy research organization that she founded in 1995 to
promote an informed debate over free-market ideas for health reform.
She speaks and writes extensively about incentives to promote a more
competitive, consumer-driven marketplace in the health sector. In
December 2004, Dr. Turner was invited by President Bush to speak
on HSAs and consumer-directed health reform at the White House Economic
Summit. She recently was appointed by former HHS Secretary Tommy
Thompson to serve as a member of the National Advisory Council of
Healthcare Research and Quality. Dr. Turner also is founder and
facilitator of the Health Policy Consensus Group, which serves as
a forum for analysts from market-oriented think tanks around the
country to analyze and develop health policy recommendations. She
is the Editor of Empowering Health Care Consumers through Tax
Reform,
published by the University of Michigan Press. Her early career was
in politics and journalism, where she received numerous awards for
her writings on economics and politics.
 Christine
G. Williams, M.Ed.
Christine G. Williams is the Director of the Office
of Communications and Knowledge Transfer at the Agency for Healthcare
Research and Quality within the Department of Health and Human Services.
She is responsible for programs to disseminate the work of the Agency,
including the Knowledge Transfer Program, which builds upon the 25
year success of the User Liaison Program, bringing research and best
practices
in health care to State and local policymakers. The Knowledge Transfer
Program has added health care systems and purchasers to the audience
base as well as expanded strategies to help to inform policy and
translate research into practice.
From l982 to 1994, Ms. Williams served as the Senior Health Policy
Staff to former Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.).
In that capacity she was involved in the development of a number
of long-term care initiatives, including Nursing Home Reform - OBRA'87,
Medicaid Spousal Impoverishment legislation, as well as two comprehensive
Long-Term Care Reform proposals. In l992, Ms. Williams received the
Distinguished Legislative Service Award from the American Health
Care Association. Ms. Williams holds a master's
of education from Boston University.
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