Jonathan Gruber is the Ford Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has taught since 1992. He is also the director of the Health Care Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he is a research associate, and president-elect of the American Society of Health Economists. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Social Insurance. He has published more than 150 research articles, has edited six research volumes, and is the author of Public Finance and Public Policy, a leading undergraduate text, and Health Care Reform, a graphic novel. In 2006 he received the American Society of Health Economists Inaugural Medal for the best health economist in the nation aged 40 and under.

During the 1997–1998 academic year, Gruber was on leave as deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the US Treasury Department. From 2003 to 2006 he was a key architect of Massachusetts’ ambitious health reform effort, and in 2006 became an inaugural member of the Health Connector Board, the main implementing body for that effort. During 2009–2010 he served as a technical consultant to the Obama Administration and worked with both the administration and Congress to help craft the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. In 2011 he was named “One of the Top 25 Most Innovative and Practical Thinkers of Our Time” by Slate magazine. In both 2006 and 2012 he was rated as one of the top 100 most powerful people in health care in the United States by Modern Healthcare magazine.

Jon Kingsdale has 40 years of experience in health care financing and policy. In 2006, he was appointed by Governor Mitt Romney to organize and lead the Massachusetts Health Connector, the model for health insurance exchanges under national health reform. After leaving the Connector in 2010, he spent the following five years consulting with public and private clients on the implementation of the ACA. He now divides his time between consulting, teaching and research.

Kingsdale is currently Managing Director of the Wakely Consulting Group’s Boston office, working with state-based marketplaces, CMS and clients in the private sector. As an Adjunct Professor of health policy at both Brown and Boston Universities, he teaches graduate students and mid-career professionals, and studies consumer behavior on health insurance exchanges.

John E. McDonough is professor of public health practice in the Department of Health Policy & Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH) and director of the HSPH Center for Executive and Continuing Professional Education.

In 2010, he was the Joan H. Tisch Distinguished Fellow in Public Health at Hunter College in New York City. Between 2008 and 2010, he served as a senior advisor on national health reform to the US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, where he worked on the development and passage of the Affordable Care Act.

Between 2003 and 2008, he served as executive director of Health Care for All, Massachusetts’ leading consumer health advocacy organization, where he played a key role in passage and implementation of the 2006 Massachusetts health reform law. Between 1998 and 2003, he was an associate professor at the Heller School at Brandeis University and a senior associate at the Schneider Institute for Health Policy. From 1985 to 1997, he served as a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, where he co-chaired the Joint Committee on Health Care.

His articles have appeared in Health Affairs, the New England Journal of Medicine, and other journals. He has written three books: Inside National Health Reform (University of California Press and the Milbank Fund, 2011), Experiencing Politics: A Legislator’s Stories of Government and Health Care (University of California Press and the Milbank Fund, 2000), and Interests, Ideas, and Deregulation: The Fate of Hospital Rate Setting (University of Michigan Press, 1998)

He received a doctorate in public health from the University of Michigan School of Public Health and a master’s in public administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.