Conference Speakers

Jon Kingsdale, Ph.D. is the Executive Director of the Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector, an independent authority established under Massachusetts’ landmark health reform legislation of 2006, to promote coverage of the uninsured. As the founding E.D., he works closely with a Board of Directors appointed by the Governor and the Attorney General to determine key elements of health reform policy and implementation. Prior to starting the Connector in June 0f 2006, Dr. Kingsdale worked as a senior executive at the Tufts Health Plan.  His responsibilities included strategic planning, policy & corporate development, government relations and new product development. He led major product innovations, including the development of various new HMO benefits for the group market, New England's largest Medicare + Choice HMO, tiered-network plans, and consumer-driven health plans.

Dr. Kingsdale joined Tufts Health Plan in 1986, after 10 years in health care financing and management. His work experience included executive roles in strategic planning and reimbursement at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, policy issues consulting in Washington, D.C., and reporting for Forbes Magazine.
 
Dr. Kingsdale received a doctorate in economic history from the University of Michigan and a B.A. in history from the University of Pennsylvania. He has taught at the Harvard School of Public Health and the Boston University School of Public Health, and the Tufts University School of Medicine. He is president of the board of directors of Ethos, a non-profit agency enhancing home care services for seniors in Boston.

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 which served as a model for the federal State Children’s Health Insurance Program. 

Dr. McDonough teaches at the Harvard 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.

Marc J. Roberts, Ph.D. is a Professor of Political Economy at the Harvard School of Public Health. He has taught in various schools at Harvard, including Arts and Sciences, the Kennedy School of Government, and the Law School, for more than thirty years. The author or co-author of approximately fifty articles and five books on health care policy and management, environmental policy, and public health ethics, he is widely known as a trainer and consultant, both is the U.S. and abroad. In recent years, he has worked with the governments of China, Hungary, Poland, Bosnia, and Turkey on health sector reform, and has taken a leading role in educational programs supported by the World Bank around the world designed to advance reform activities.

Dr. Roberts is currently finishing a book on the ethical and philosophical problems of allocating scarce health care resources, and a handbook to guide government officials in developing countries through the process of health sector reform.

James Roosevelt, Jr. is President and CEO of Tufts Health Plan, Waltham, MA. He is Co-Chairman of Tufts Health Care Institute and Past President of the American Health Lawyers Association. He is also chief legal counsel for the Massachusetts Democratic Party and co-chair of the Rules and By-laws Committee of the Democratic National Committee. He was Associate Commissioner for Retirement Policy of the Social Security Administration and a partner in Choate, Hall & Stewart in Boston.

He is a frequent lecturer and author on legal and public policy topics and he is Clinical Instructor in the Department of Public Health and Community Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine.

He completed the Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School in 2003, earned his J.D. in 1971 from Harvard Law School and his A.B. from Harvard College in 1968. He is admitted to the bars of the District of Columbia, Massachusetts and the U.S. Supreme Court.