Speaker Biographies
“Health Insurance Exchanges: See How They Run”
May 11, 2009
Nancy Turnbull is a senior lecturer in health policy in the Department of Health Policy and Management and the Associate Dean for Educational Programs at the Harvard School of Public Health. Her research interests include health insurance regulation and health care access. Before joining HSPH, Nancy worked for almost ten years for the Massachusetts Division of Insurance, where she was First Deputy Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner for Health Policy. Nancy has been actively involved in the development and implementation of the Massachusetts health reform law, including serving on the board of the Massachusetts Health Insurance Connector Authority.
Linda J. Blumberg, Ph.D. is an economist and senior fellow in The Urban Institute’s HealthPolicyCenter. She is an expert on private health insurance, health care financing, and health system reform. Her recent work includes: an analyses of the potential roles of insurance exchanges under reform; development of policy options to expand insurance coverage in New York state and estimation of their cost and coverage implications; an analysis of the cost issues under Massachusetts’ health care reform; an analysis of the potential for public plan options to reduce costs under reform; and an analysis of public health insurance buy-in programs for children. She has analyzed standards of affordability for insurance coverage; led a study of health insurance issues of workers with disabilities; developed a roadmap to universal coverage in the state of Massachusetts; and developed options for expanding insurance coverage to high cost/high risk individuals. She served as health policy advisor to the Clinton Administration during its initial health care reform effort. First at the Department of Health and Human Services and then at the Office of Management and Budget, she was a coordinator of the quantitative modeling effort through the final stages of development of the Health Security Act, and then through the development of alternative policies with Congress.
Rick Curtis is president of the Institute for Health Policy Solutions (IHPS), a non-partisan, not-for-profit organization with the overarching goal of helping to achieve coverage by and for all Americans. Mr. Curtis has an extensive background in health insurance coverage, market rules, exchanges/purchasing pools, and health financing issues, and works to develop cost-effective coverage approaches at the state as well as the national level.
In recent years, IHPS led an interdisciplinary team which provided design and analysis assistance for California’s reform effort. Its current work focuses largely on federal reform design issues. Curtis’s previous positions include: Director of Health Policy Studies, National Governors’ Association; founding Executive Director, NationalAcademy for State Health Policy and Board Chair of its parent Center for Health Policy Development; and Director of the Department of Policy Development and Research, Health Insurance Association of America. He chaired a technical group working on preliminary reform plans for the Clinton Administration. While at NGA in the 1980s, he also served as the contributing editor on state health policy to Business and Health magazine and as Director of the Project on the Medically Indigent for the Academy for State and Local Government.