PBGH names David Lansky to succeed longtime CEO Peter Lee
San Francisco Business Times - by Chris Rauber
The Pacific Business Group on Health, which represents 50 of the largest employers on the West Coast, has named David Lansky, Ph.D., as its new president and CEO.
Lansky succeeds longtime CEO Peter Lee, who remains at San Francisco-based PBGH in a new role as executive director of national health policy, the employer group said Thursday.
Lansky said he and Lee will work collaboratively on various issues, with Lee taking the lead on some and Lansky on others. "I see us collaborating on a lot of these things," he said.
The San Francisco Business Times reported Dec. 21 that Lee would be stepping down this month as CEO and moving into the new "policy wonk" role, which some sources see as his natural strength.
Lansky previously was senior director at the New York-based Markle Foundation, where he helped develop a policy framework for a national health information network and advocated for increased consumer involvement in the health-care IT arena, according to PBGH.
Prior to that, he was the founding president of the Foundation for Accountability, which ceased operations in 2004, when he moved to Markle to continue similar efforts.
Paul Fearer, executive vice president of Union Bank of California and chairman of the PBGH board, called Lansky "a proven health care leader with a vision for system transformation" linking consumerism and an understanding of employers' needs.
"I look forward to being a part of PBGH and its state and national efforts to promote a health-care system that is affordable, patient-centered and evidence-based," Lansky said in the statement.
Ironically, the changing of the guard at PBGH occurred just days after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's health-care reform plan failed to make it out of a Senate committee, illustrating the difficulty of reforming the current health-care system at the state level. Even so, Lee told the Business Times the collapse of reform in the Golden State could actually give efforts at the federal level "more gas" once a new president and Congress take office.
"The need to moderate costs and improve quality" is not a Democratic or a Republican issue, Lee said, predicting that "a new president will have a mandate for change."
In his new, policy wonk role, Lee will remain involved in attempts to reform the way doctors and hospitals are paid for delivering health care and to promote national quality and efficiency standards.
In recent years, PBGH's clout with Northern California's increasingly consolidated health-care providers and insurers appears to have declined, according to some observers, and its budget was affected dramatically by the closure in late 2006 of its Pacific Health Advantage purchasing pool for small businesses. It has a staff of 25, which is down from about 130 in early 2006, due primarily to the closure of the PacAdvantage program.
Lee succeeded founding President, CEO and Executive Director Patricia Powers in June 2000. During seven years as CEO, he emphasized value, consumer engagement, transparency and the use of user-friendly Internet tools for consumers.
The employer group represents more than 3 million employees, retirees and their families and roughly $5 billion in annual health-care expenditures; member companies include many of the region's largest employers, including Bechtel, Chevron, Cisco Systems, McKesson, Pacific Gas & Electric, Safeway, Stanford University, Target, the University of California and Wells Fargo.
Seventeen of those companies use PBGH to jointly negotiate their HMO contracts with large insurers in California, Lee noted, but not their self-insured national PPO contracts.
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