Regina Herzlinger

Regina Herzlinger: Profile

Passionate, compelling, and without peer as a scholar in the field of health care, Harvard Business School economist Regina Herzlinger is one of the most influential people driving the national health care debate. She approaches the complex and divisive issues of reform with innovative theories and clarity of voice. Her 2007 book, Who Killed Health Care, stood ahead of the curve and landed at the top of bestseller list.

Herzlinger is an avid contributor to news outlets including The Washington Times, The Huffington Post, and National Review, and maintains an expansive Q&A about health care on her website. Widely respected in Washington, Herzlinger breaks down complex issues of health care reform into a comprehensible and surprising conversation for audiences of all sizes.

Topical and thought-provoking. Herzlinger has been called an "original thinker," "bold and courageous," and more provocatively, a "health care heretic." She supports neither governmental nor corporate-run healthcare plans, but rather a consumer-driven system. Herzlinger believes in putting decisions firmly in the hands of citizens through an open-market system. Hospitals, doctors, and insurers would compete for patient-consumers in a way that mimics the retail sector. Could such a system eliminate excess spending and save Americans money? Encourage medical innovations? Create transparency for the greater good of patients?

She was an early predictor of the unraveling of managed care, and in early 2009, she predicted that the Congressional health care reforms will not pass, a prediction supported by the surprising election of a Republican Senator in 2010 who upended the Democrats' unitary control of the Congress. Herzlinger supports universal coverage but felt that the Congressional plans for effecting it would not pass muster with American people.

One of the most powerful people in healthcare. Herzlinger was the first woman to be tenured and chaired at Harvard Business School. She is currently the Nancy R. McPherson Professor and Chair of Business Administration at Harvard, and a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. Her bestselling books have carefully untangled the motives and methods of the insurance, hospital, governmental, employment and academic sectors. The US Department of Commerce cited Who Killed Health Care as one of the ten books that changed the debate in 2008.

At Harvard, Business School students flock to her Innovating in Health Care class, and she is frequently called on for comment by CNN, ABC News, and The Economist. She serves on numerous corporate boards, and has been repeatedly selected as one of the "100 Most Powerful People in Healthcare" by Modern Healthcare. Herzlinger was the recipient of the American College of Healthcare Executives' Thompson Book of the Year Award twice and the Academy of Healthcare Executives Research Award three times. Her discussion of a bold new plan for healthcare is intriguing, informative, and not to be missed.