health-policy
(19)
Woodberry Associates Makes Influence Look Like Choreography
Most public-affairs firms sell access or attention. Woodberry Associates sells the harder thing: a system for turning policy, data and scattered constituencies into coordinated action.
The Lobbying Firm That Put Its Employees Inside the Venn Diagram
Venn Strategies sells access, policy fluency and persuasion. Then its founder made an unusually literal bet on alignment: she gave the people doing the work a stake in the firm.
The People Who Know Where the Policy Is Buried
CCR Consulting hires people who have already lived inside the systems its clients are trying to change. The result is a particular kind of consultancy: less crystal ball, more institutional memory with a project plan.
The Six-Week Reversal: How Cullari Communications Global Turns Trust Into Infrastructure
The Hershey consultancy does not sell attention for its own sake. It builds coalitions around the people whose trust a health company cannot manufacture - and measures what happens next.
The Firm Between the Hearing Room and the Church Basement
Pyxis Partners has built a business translating between Washington's health-policy rooms and communities that have good reasons to distrust them. Its real product is not access alone. It is the patient work of making access travel both ways.
Waxman Strategies Put a Velvet Rope Around Influence
In Washington, access is usually sold to whoever can pay. Michael Waxman built a firm around a narrower proposition: policy, advocacy and communications for work it can defend in public.
The People Who Read Washington's Fine Print for a Living
A small policy firm built a business around an unglamorous advantage: noticing what changed, explaining why it matters, and doing it before everyone else catches up.
The Last Mile of a Medical Breakthrough Runs Through Washington
A therapy can clear the lab and still stall at a code, a coverage rule, or a committee door. Jeffrey J. Kimbell & Associates built a business around that awkward final mile.
The Scientists Who Learned to Speak Washington
A small Washington firm found a lucrative gap between the laboratory and the legislature. Its job is to make good science legible to the people who fund it.
Farbod Hagigi Has Spent 20 Years Fixing the Hand-Off
The ClinicalBox founder built a career around a stubborn observation: complex systems fail at their seams. His answer has been equal parts policy research, software design, and patient attention.
Lisa Morgan Is Building Midwifery for the Distance
After a military education, a global project career and 14 years in a northern university, Lisa Morgan now brings a systems thinker’s discipline to Nunavut’s public service.
Vishnukamal Golla Is Building the Missing Middle of Cancer Care
A surgeon trained to operate on the body turned his attention to the machinery around it - the incentives, handoffs and tools that determine whether specialty care actually works as one system.
Robert Ashford
Robert Ashford is a recovery scientist and the co-founder and CEO of RecoveryLink, a Philadelphia-based digital platform that helps people and organizations find and deliver peer-based recovery support around the clock. With a PhD in health policy and an MSW from the University of Pennsylvania, he has authored more than 50 peer-reviewed papers, founded the Journal of Recovery Science, and advised SAMHSA and the Philadelphia Mayor's Task Force on the opioid epidemic. He also serves as Executive Director of Unity Recovery, building tools and language that treat recovery as a measurable, fundable field rather than an afterthought.
Rahul Rajkumar
Rahul Rajkumar is the founder and CEO of Accompany Health, a Bethesda, Maryland company delivering home-based, technology-enabled primary, behavioral, and social care to low-income Americans with complex needs, especially dual-eligible Medicare-Medicaid patients. A Yale-trained physician and lawyer who holds an MD and a JD, he spent 15 years redesigning how the U.S. pays for and delivers care, from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation to chief medical officer roles at CareFirst and Blue Cross North Carolina and COO of Optum Care Solutions. Accompany Health launched in January 2024 with $56 million in Series A funding led by Venrock, ARCH Venture Partners, and IVP.
Rebekah Gee
Dr. Rebekah Gee is the founder and CEO of Nest Health, the first value-based primary, behavioral, and social care provider built for whole families on Medicaid, delivered through house calls and virtual visits from a base in New Orleans. An obstetrician-gynecologist and health-policy researcher, she ran the Louisiana Department of Health from 2016 to 2020, where she led Medicaid expansion and pioneered a subscription drug-payment model for hepatitis C. She was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2017 and now runs a startup that has raised a $22.5M Series A to scale care for the families the system tends to forget.
James Capretta
James C. Capretta is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he holds the Milton Friedman Chair and studies health care, entitlement programs, and the long fiscal arc of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. He spent more than 16 years inside the federal government, including as an associate director at the White House Office of Management and Budget from 2001 to 2004, where he was the lead OMB official on Medicare and Medicaid policy. A market-oriented reformer who argues for consumer choice and cost discipline over centralized control, he is the author of US Health Policy and Market Reforms: An Introduction and a prolific commentator on the math of America's safety-net programs.
Joseph Antos
Joseph Antos is one of Washington's most-quoted health economists, the Wilson H. Taylor Scholar in Health Care and Retirement Policy and a senior fellow emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute. A University of Rochester PhD who started as a Cornell math major, he spent decades inside the federal machinery - the Congressional Budget Office, the Council of Economic Advisers, OMB, the Department of Labor and HHS - before becoming AEI's go-to voice on Medicare, the federal budget, and market-based reform. He has advised the World Bank and foreign governments, served terms regulating hospital rates in Maryland, and teaches at George Washington University.
Marina Kusserow
Marina Kusserow is an Operating Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) on the Bio+Health team, where she leads healthcare business development strategy across payers, providers, and large employers. A health policy graduate who cut her teeth at Oxeon Partners, then became Chief of Staff for Walmart Health's clinical delivery team, then tackled M&A at Unite Us, Marina now serves as connective tissue between a16z's portfolio companies and the broader healthcare ecosystem. She splits her time between New York City and Nashville, Tennessee.
Ziad Obermeyer
Ziad Obermeyer is a physician-scientist and professor at UC Berkeley whose 2019 Science paper exposing racial bias in a healthcare algorithm used by millions changed how the world thinks about AI fairness. An emergency medicine doctor who moonlights as a machine learning researcher, McKinsey alum, and serial founder, Obermeyer co-founded Dandelion Health and Nightingale Open Science while testifying before Congress and earning a spot on TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI.