John McDonough is a professor of public health practice and director of the Center for Executive and Continuing Professional Education at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
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 U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions where he worked on the writing 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 central role in the passage of the 2006 Massachusetts Health Reform Law. From 1998 through 2003, he was an Associate Professor at the Heller School at Brandeis University. 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 the New England Journal of Medicine, Health Affairs and other journals. He has written three books: Experiencing Politics: A Legislator’s Stories of Government and Health Care by the University of California Press and the Milbank Fund in 2000, and Interests, Ideas, and Deregulation: The Fate of Hospital Rate Setting by the University of Michigan Press in 1998. His book, Inside National Health Reform, was published in 2011 by the University of California Press and the Milbank Fund. He received a doctorate in public health from the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan and a master’s in public administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.