Speaker biographies

Holly Benson was sworn in as secretary of the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation on January 2, 2007. Prior to joining Governor Charlie Crist’s administration, Secretary Benson served in the Florida House of Representatives from November 2000 until January 2007. She also practiced municipal bond law at Miller, Canfield, Paddock and Stone, P.L.C. from 1996 until her appointment. During her time in the House, Representative Benson transformed the state’s $16 billion Medicaid system as chair of the Health and Families Council and co-chair of the Select Committee on Medicaid Reform, tackled reorganizing the state court system as chair of the Select Committee on Article V, and updated the state’s procurement code as chair of the Committee on State Administration.

John Holahan is director of the Health Policy Research Center at the Urban Institute. He has managed numerous health research projects in the last thirty-five years and authored many books and papers on health policy. Much of his work has focused on the Medicaid program, as well as state health policy and issues of federalism and health, including the development of proposals for comprehensive Medicaid reform, analyses of the growth in Medicaid expenditures over time, and the implications of block grants and expenditure caps and changes in matching formulas on states. He has developed proposals for broad health-system reform, most recently in Massachusetts. He has also published research on the reasons for the growth the number of uninsured over the past decade, the effects of proposals to expand health insurance coverage on the number of uninsured, and the cost of such expansion to federal and state governments. Other research interests include health-system reform, managed care, physician payment, and hospital cost containment.

John McClaughry has been president of the Ethan Allen Institute since its founding in 1993. He was legislative aide to Vermont senator Winston Prouty from 1965 to 1967, a fellow of the Institute of Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University from 1967 to 1968, a member of the Vermont House of Representatives from 1969 to 1972, senior policy advisor in President Ronald Reagan’s White House Office of Policy Development from 1981 to 1982, a member of the Vermont Senate from 1989 to 1992, and Republican candidate for governor of Vermont in 1992. He has served on four presidential commissions by appointment of Presidents Nixon, Carter, and Reagan, and has been town moderator of Kirby, Vermont, for the past forty years.

Thomas P. Miller, a former senior health economist for the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, studies health-care policy and regulation at AEI. A lawyer by training and a former journalist, Miller has worked on issues ranging from Medicare prescription drug benefits to medical savings accounts. While at the committee, he worked on social security reform legislation and organized a number of hearings that focused on reforms in private health-care markets. He previously was the director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute for three years, where he directed a research program that focused on restoring individual choice, control, and responsibility to the U.S. health-care system. Miller also spent fourteen years at the Competitive Enterprise Institute as director of economic policy studies and as a senior policy analyst for issues involving health-care regulation, entitlement reform, insurance regulation, banking, antitrust, fiscal policy, and privacy.

Mark Pauly is the Bendheim Professor in the Department of Health Care Systems at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is a professor of health care systems, insurance and risk management, and business and public policy at the Wharton School, and is a professor of economics in the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. Mr. Pauly is a former commissioner on the Physician Payment Review Commission and an active member of the Institute of Medicine. One of the nation’s leading health economists, Mr. Pauly has made significant contributions to the fields of medical economics and health insurance, particularly with respect to reducing the number of uninsured individuals through tax credits for public and private insurance, and appropriate design for Medicare in a budget-constrained environment. Mr. Pauly is a coeditor in chief of the International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics and an associate editor of the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty. He has served on Institute of Medicine panels on public accountability for health insurers under Medicare and on improving the financing of vaccines. He is an appointed member of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services National Advisory Committee to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

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