Allyson Y. Schwartz, President and CEO of the Better Medicare Alliance and a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Pennsylvania who served from 2005-2015, is a nationally recognized leader on health care issues. Better Medicare Alliance is the leading advocacy coalition supporting Medicare Advantage. Having worked as a health service executive, Schwartz was elected to the Pennsylvania State Senate in 1990, serving 14 years until her election to Congress. In the state Senate, Schwartz was the driving force behind Pennsylvania’s CHIP program, which was a model for the federal CHIP program five years later. In Congress, Schwartz was appointed to the Ways and Means Committee and served as a senior member of the Budget Committee. In both capacities, Schwartz was a strong advocate for Medicare. She was the leader in Congress on physician payment reform to encourage value over volume, supported research, innovation, and use of technology to improve quality, efficiency and contain costs. Schwartz is a Distinguished Policy Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, Visiting Fellow at the Penn Wharton Public Policy Initiative and Co-Chair of the Bipartisan Policy Center Health and Housing Task Force.

Mark T. Bertolini is Chairman and CEO of Aetna, a Fortune 50 diversified health care benefits company. He assumed the role of Chairman in 2011 and CEO in 2010. He also served as President from 2007 to 2014. Mr. Bertolini joined Aetna in 2003 as head of Aetna’s Specialty Products.

Before joining Aetna, Mr. Bertolini held executive positions at Cigna, NYLCare Health Plans, and SelectCare, Inc., where he was President and CEO. Mr. Bertolini also serves as a director of Verizon Communications Inc., Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company, The Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, and the Fidelco Guide Dog Foundation.

Kavita Patel is the Associate Chief Medical Officer and Medicare Director at Johns Hopkins Medicine, Sibley Hospital, responsible for the oversight of primary care transformation and population health in the outpatient setting. She is also a nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. Previously, she was a Fellow and Managing Director of Delivery System Reform and Clinical Transformation at the Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform in the Department of Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution. At the Institution, Dr. Patel is specifically working on helping health care systems understand how to transform their clinical environments to become more accountable for the care they provide as well as other aspects of health reform implementation. Dr. Patel also serves on the GAO Appointed Physician-Focused Payment Model Technical Advisory Committee (PTAC) which is charged with developing alternative payment models for Medicare as a result of the bipartisan, bicameral Medicare and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA) which aims to accelerate the movement to value-based care.

Tom Scully is a General Partner with Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe, a private equity firm in New York, which is the most active US PE investor in healthcare.

Previously, Mr. Scully was the Administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). At CMS, Mr. Scully had an instrumental role in designing and passing Medicare reform and Medicare Part D legislation and in making the vast agency more open and accountable to the public. He initiated the first public reporting and disclosure for comparative quality among hospitals, nursing homes, home health agencies and dialysis centers. Before joining CMS, Tom served as President and CEO of the Federation of American Hospitals from 1995 to 2001. The FAH represents 1700 privately owned hospitals.

Susan Dentzer is President and Chief Executive Officer of the Network for Excellence in Health Innovation, a not-for-profit think tank and membership organization whose more than 80 members span the spectrum of health and health care. Through its research, publications, and convenings, NEHI works to advance the health of the public, improve health care, and produce smarter health care spending for the nation.

One of the nation’s most respected health policy thought leaders, Dentzer was senior policy adviser to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and was editor-in-chief of the policy journal Health Affairs, and the on-air Health Correspondent for the PBS NewsHour.

Dentzer is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and serves on its Board on Population Health and Public Health Practice. She is an elected member of the Council on Foreign Relations; a fellow of the National Academy of Social Insurance; and a fellow of the Hastings Center, a bioethics institute.

David Blumenthal, M.D., M.P.P., is president of The Commonwealth Fund, a national philanthropy engaged in independent research on health and social policy issues.

Dr. Blumenthal is formerly the Samuel O. Thier Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Chief Health Information and Innovation Officer at Partners Healthcare System in Boston. From 2009 to 2011, he served as the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, with the charge to build an interoperable, private, and secure nationwide health information system and to support the widespread, meaningful use of health IT. He succeeded in putting in place one of the largest publicly funded infrastructure investments the nation has ever made in such a short time period, in health care or any other field.

Mr. Bringewatt is Co-founder and President of the National Health Policy Group (NHPG) and Co-founder and President of the SNP Alliance. The SNP Alliance provides national leadership and advocacy for advancing integration and specialty care for high-risk/high-need beneficiaries through Special Needs Plans (SNPs) and Medicare-Medicaid Plans (MMPs). Prior to his current leadership positions, Mr. Bringewatt co-founded and served as President and CEO of the National Chronic Care Consortium (NCCC), a strategic alliance of leading acute and long-term care systems seeking to advance improvements in care for persons with severe or disabling chronic conditions as their conditions evolve over time and across care settings. Functioning as a policy entrepreneur and catalyst for change, Mr. Bringewatt works with other national leaders and groups to transform payment, policy and oversight practices to better serve poor, frail, disabled and chronically ill persons.

Margaret E. O’Kane is the founder and president of the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA).

She was elected a member of the Institute of Medicine in 1999 and received the 2009 Picker Institute Individual Award for Excellence in the Advancement of Patient-Centered Care. Modern Healthcare magazine has named O’Kane one of the “100 Most Influential People in Healthcare” eleven times, most recently in 2016, and one of the “Top 25 Women in Healthcare” three times. She received the 2012 Gail L. Warden Leadership Excellence Award from the National Center for Healthcare Leadership.

Jane Gilbert is the Director of Retiree Health Care for the Teachers’ Retirement System of the State of Kentucky (TRS) and has served TRS retirees since April 2002. She manages two retiree health plans covering 46,000 retirees. She also serves as a leader in the areas of health insurance cost containment, project management, risk management and federal health care solutions.

Ms. Gilbert served in management and directorship positions for a Louisville Kentucky law firm and cost containment company, The Rawlings Company, from 1989 through 2002. Prior to serving at The Rawlings Company, she worked as an accountant for a national CPA firm.

Ms. Gilbert graduated with honors from Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky, with a Bachelor of Arts in Accounting in 1987 and became a CPA in 1992. Ms. Gilbert currently serves on the Retiree Membership Committee for the State and Local Government Benefits Association and is a proud member of the Public Sector Healthcare Roundtable.

Thomas E. Hutchinson is a Strategic Advisor for EBG Advisors, Inc. He has more than 25 years of experience in both the private sector and in federal service implementing programs and policies directly affecting Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries. Mr. Hutchinson advises clients on a wide range of payment policy and operations issues relating to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

Prior to his joining EBG Advisors in this business advisory role, Mr. Hutchinson served as the director of the Medicare Plan Payment Group at CMS, where he was responsible for all aspects of annual Medicare payments to Part C (Medicare Advantage) and Part D (drug) plans, totaling approximately $160 billion. This included all payment policy, systems development and implementation of the policies, validations of payments, and ensuring auditing compliance of these payments. The Part D risk adjustment model and the new (for 2012) Part C risk adjustment model were both developed under his leadership.

Mark Newsom has 20 years of experience focusing on the intersection of health policy and business. He currently serves as Vice President of Public Policy Analysis at Humana, where he advises senior business executives on the policy environment and leads analysis of CMS regulations and guidance. Mark joined Humana in July 2015, after serving as a Director of Public Policy at CVS Health, where he focused on the pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) subsidiary and the Business Development /Merger and Acquisition team. Prior to CVS Health, Mark spent nearly 6 years at CMS, developing Medicare Advantage (MA) and Part D payment policies and operations. Mark also served two years as a senior policy analyst at the Congressional Research Service (CRS) and as Director of Medicare Policy and Compliance at Coventry.

Stacy Sanders was formerly Director of National Neighbors Silver at the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC). Prior to joining NCRC, she was Director of the Elder Economic Security Initiative (Elder Initiative) at Wider Opportunities for Women (WOW), where she worked with state- and community-based organizations across the country to promote the use of an economic security framework and tools in senior programs and policies. She has also served as a National Advisory Panel member on the Social Work Leadership Institute’s Hartford Partnership Program for Aging Education.

Sanders has a master’s degree in social work from the University of Michigan and is the recipient of a McGregor Geriatric Fellowship award. She is also a member of the National Academy of Social Insurance and serves on the National Commission for Quality Assurance (NCQA) Consumer Advisory Board and the National Council on Aging (NCOA) Center for Benefits Access Advisory Board.