George C. Halvorson was named chairman and chief executive officer of Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Inc. and Kaiser Foundation Hospitals, headquartered in Oakland, Calif. in March 2002. Kaiser Permanente is the nation's largest nonprofit health plan and hospital system, serving more than 8.5 million members.
Halvorson has more than 30 years of health care management experience. He was formerly President and CEO of HealthPartners, headquartered in Minneapolis and has held several senior management positions with Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota, prior to that time.
Halvorson is the author of comprehensive books on the U.S. health care system including the newly released Health Care Will Not Reform Itself: A User's Guide to Refocusing and Reforming American Health Care. He also wrote Health Care Reform Now!, Health Care Co-ops in Uganda, Strong Medicine and Epidemic of Care, which Warren Buffet said was "by far the clearest explanation of how we have gotten to where we are in health care and what is likely to happen."
Halvorson is also writing a new book about racial prejudice around the world. He has served as an advisor to the governments of Uganda, Great Britain, Jamaica, and Russia on issues of health policy and financing.
Widely credited with supporting the successful rollout of Kaiser's multi-billion dollar information technology initiative, Halvorson has won numerous awards for his commitment to health technology, including the Modern Healthcare/Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) CEO IT Achievement Award and the Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange (WEDI) awarded Halvorson the 2009 Louis Sullivan Award for leadership and achievements in advancing health care quality. He has written countless articles on subjects ranging from health information technology to the changing marketplace in respected publications including Health Affairs.
Halvorson serves on a number of boards, including those of America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), where he was the 2007-2008 chairman, the Alliance of Community Health Plans, and the World Economic Forum Global Health Advisory Board. He is the current president of the International Federation of Health Plans, chairman of the Partnership for Quality Care with Service Employees International Union (SEIU), serves on the American Hospital Association's Advisory Committee on Health Care Reform, serves on the Institute of Medicine Task Force on Evidence Based Medicine, and on the Commonwealth Fund Commission on a High Performance Health System.
In 2009, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger appointed him to the bipartisan Commission on the 21st Century Economy to re-examine and modernize California's out-of-date revenue laws. He has also served as a Health Care Govenor since 2005 at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland and chaired the Health Care Governors for the 2009 conference.
