She runs the collaborative that refuses the old trade-off between a paycheck and a pulse.
Executive Director · Better Health Better Pay Collaborative · New York
A hospital can stitch a wound and discharge a patient straight back into the conditions that caused it - a job that disappeared, a paycheck that never stretched, a future without a next rung. Anne Rascón spends her days on the seam between those two facts. As Executive Director of the Better Health Better Pay Collaborative, she treats a steady, better-paying job as a clinical input, not an afterthought.
BHBP is a nonprofit that brings Managed Care Organizations, Medicaid agencies, and workforce leaders into the same room and gives them a shared scoreboard. The premise is unfashionably blunt: health and income move together, so the systems that govern them should too. Rascón's job is to make that cooperation real - frameworks, measurement tools, demonstrations, waivers, and the unglamorous plumbing of cross-sector partnership.
Her own description of the mission is plain enough to fit on an index card: connect people to education, training, and employment that lead to greater health and financial stability. The radical part is who she's connecting - Medicaid members, the population most systems treat as a cost line rather than a constituency with ambition.
She arrived here by way of a career that touched all three sectors. Rascón directed nationwide workforce training efforts and advised the U.S. Department of Labor, national employers, and workforce boards on how to design training and education programs that actually move people. That breadth is rare in a field where most people pick a lane and stay in it.
"Connecting individuals to education, training and employment opportunities that lead to greater health and financial stability is at the heart of what we do." — Anne Rascón, Better Health Better Pay Collaborative
Diagnose differently. Treat unemployment and underemployment as drivers of poor health, not unrelated misfortune.
Build the bridge. Connect Medicaid members and MCOs to education, training, and real career pathways.
Measure the climb. Use the Ascend Score™ to track whether a member is actually moving toward self-sufficiency.
Cross-sector innovation is the kind of phrase that dies on a conference slide. Rascón's contribution is to make it ship. BHBP designs and implements the systems that let healthcare, workforce, and human-services agencies share a goal and a yardstick - connecting the wiring, building self-sufficiency frameworks, developing the direct-care workforce through recruitment, training and retention, and facilitating the Medicaid demonstrations and waivers that let any of it happen at scale.
The organization describes itself as led by nationally recognized experts in healthcare and workforce strategy. Rascón specializes in the integration itself - the policies, programs, and resources that have to be braided together across workforce development, education, and the healthcare system before a single member benefits.
The Ascend Score™ is the tell. A collaborative that only wanted good press would stop at partnerships. BHBP built a proprietary instrument to ask the harder question: is the member actually better off, and can we prove it over time?
Illustration of BHBP's stated focus areas - relative emphasis, not financials.
A Florida health plan serving Medicaid members signed on to connect its members with career and education resources - employment treated as part of the care plan.
Florida's 24 local workforce development boards became the on-ramps, turning a policy idea into actual classrooms, training seats, and job leads.
The Florida Self-Sufficiency Council brought health and workforce leaders to one table to push members toward stability - and to measure whether it worked.
"We are proud to partner with health care organizations, like Simply in Florida, to connect their members with the resources they need to thrive." — Anne Rascón
Her whole model rests on one unfashionable line: a better job can be preventive medicine.
BHBP built the Ascend Score™ - a proprietary tool to measure a member's progress toward self-sufficiency instead of just claiming it.
Public, private, nonprofit - she has worked across all three, which is why she can translate between rooms that usually shout past each other.
Profile compiled from public sources including the Better Health Better Pay Collaborative website and 2023 reporting on the Florida Self-Sufficiency Council. Facts limited to what is publicly verifiable.