HRSA State Planning Grant Program: State Activities 

 Bios:

Alice Burton is director of the State Health Policy Group at AcademyHealth, where she leads The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's State Coverage Initiatives (SCI) program and AcademyHealth's work with states. She works with state policy leaders to develop strategies to improve insurance coverage and has participated in numerous taskforces on the uninsured -- both as a member and an advisor. She contributes regularly to publications for states on health coverage.

Previously, Ms. Burton was the director of the planning administration at the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. In that role, she was responsible for developing policy initiatives for the Maryland Medicaid program, the Maryland Children's Health Insurance program and other health care financing programs. She developed and oversaw the HealthChoice Evaluation, the state's first comprehensive evaluation of its Medicaid managed care program and worked to implement recommendations coming out of that report. She also served a leader for Maryland's Health Resources and Services Administration Planning Grant on the uninsured.

Ms. Burton is a graduate of the University of Maryland, College Park, and holds a master's degree in health policy from the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health.

State Reinsurance Programs to expand coverage

 Bios:

Deborah Chollet is a Senior Fellow at Mathematica Policy Research in Washington, DC.   Dr. Chollet conducts and manages research on private health insurance coverage, markets, and regulation—including employer-sponsored health plans for workers and retirees, individual health insurance, and Medicare supplement plans.   She regularly provides technical assistance to States regarding private health insurance and health care reform.  Her research includes estimation of the impacts of regulation on health insurance markets and coverage, and state-level modeling of the costs and coverage impacts of major health care reform.  She serves as a senior consultant to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s State Coverage Initiatives program, on the editorial boards of Benefits Quarterly and the Journal of Insurance Issues. 

Dr. Chollet’s previous positions include Vice President of Alpha Center (now AcademyHealth); Director of the Center for Risk Management and Insurance Research and Associate Professor of Risk Management and Insurance at Georgia State University; Senior Researcher at the Employee Benefit Research Institute; and Assistant Professor of Economics at Temple University. 

Dr. Chollet holds M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Economics from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University.

 Bios:

Richard Curtis has an extensive background in health insurance coverage and financing issues. As President of IHPS, an independent not-for-profit organization he founded in April 1992, he develops policy approaches and assists program design for coverage initiatives at the state, national and local levels. A key focus is development of complementary public and private financing roles to cover uninsured workers and families. (Premium assistance is one example.) Recent roles with other organizations include: expert consultant on coverage of the uninsured with the Institute of Medicine Committee on Rapid Advance Demonstration Projects; and participant as one of 50 health "leaders" participating in the Health Sector Assembly. He has met with executives

in a number of states over the past several years as an expert consultant on coverage of the uninsured on behalf of the National Governors' Association Center for Best Practices. Presentations to other key state leaders and legislators regarding coverage strategies in the past year include forums in New York, Colorado, Florida, Washington State and Wisconsin.

Previous positions Mr. Curtis has held include: Director of Health Policy Studies, National Governors' Association (NGA); founding Executive Director, National Academy for State Health Policy; and Director of the Department of Policy Development and Research, Health Insurance Association of America. He chaired a technical group on

state-federal roles for the White House's preliminary design of healthcare reform (Spring 1993), participated as an expert on health insurance market implications for the U.S. Senate majority (Republican) retreat on health care reform, and served as (non-partisan) lead expert witness for the U.S. Senate Finance Committee Hearing on the role of Alliances and alternatives in health reform system. While at HIAA, he convened a multi-sector coalition that successfully advanced Medicaid eligibility for all poor children, and while at NGA, he was a contributing editor to Business and Health magazine and Director of the Project on the Medically Indigent for the Academy for State and Local Government.