Who Controls American Hospital Policy
32 individuals. Every conflict. Every dollar. Every red flag.
32 Individuals. Every Conflict on Record.
The AHA board and executive team as of January 1, 2027. Sorted by red flag count. Updated November 2026.
J. Stephen Jones, MD
President & CEO | Inova Health
Jones is a surgeon-turned-system builder who has turned Inova into the dominant, cash-rich hospital monopoly of Northern Virginia, posting $2 billion in 2025 net income while his own pay climbed to $6.5 million. Inova's charity care remains a low single-digit share of revenue, and the system pairs calls for easier permitting for itself with lobbying on a COPN regime that protects incumbents. His AHA seat gives the nation's wealthiest suburban market a direct voice at the trade group that does Inova's federal lobbying.
Philip O. Ozuah, MD, PhD
President & CEO | Montefiore Einstein (Montefiore Medicine)
Ozuah runs an $8.8 billion Bronx safety-net system that lives on government payers, federal disaster money and state tax transfers, and he is paid $16.7 million to do it. As the subsidies ebbed in 2025 the system swung to a $120.9 million operating loss, cut its credit outlook, endured a record strike and began automating nurse jobs, while his pay kept climbing. He sits on the boards of an insurer (Cigna), a drugmaker (Organon) and the hospital lobby (AHA) at once, and his flagship hospital faces a congressional inquiry that put its tax exemption in question.
Pamela M. Sutton-Wallace
President & Acting CEO | Yale New Haven Health System
Sutton-Wallace is a career academic-medical-center operator who rose to acting CEO of Connecticut's dominant hospital system in June 2026 amid operating losses, executive purges, a failed acquisition and a mass data breach. Her system's recent surplus came from a 340B settlement, not operations, and it wields Connecticut's CON regime to wall off competitors. Her AHA seat puts a leader whose system depends on 340B money and entry barriers in a position to steer the lobby defending both.
W. Mason Van Houweling
Chief Executive Officer | University Medical Center of Southern Nevada
Van Houweling is a for-profit-trained operator who stabilized Las Vegas's county hospital and now draws more than $1 million a year as a public employee, with commissioners obligated by contract to pay his bonus even during job cuts and thin cash. UMC lives on Medicaid and supplemental government payments, so his AHA seat ties federal subsidy policy directly to his own hospital's survival and his own incentive pay. His public-hospital profile is useful cover for an association whose policy wins mostly benefit far wealthier private systems.
Michele Baker Richardson, JD
President & CEO | HEA Consultants, LLC
Baker Richardson is a professional board director whose path to the AHA runs through chairing Advocate Health, the mega-system created by the Advocate Aurora-Atrium merger. Her board approved pay of roughly $25.8 million for its CEO, booked a $4.6 billion 2025 bottom line on investment gains and kept expanding, with Atrium now absorbing WakeMed over price warnings from North Carolina's treasurer, while facing an antitrust class action in Wisconsin. Her trustee seat adds a consolidation-era governance voice to an AHA board already dominated by large systems.
Marc L. Boom, MD
President & CEO | Houston Methodist
Marc Boom runs a $4.4 billion nonprofit that posted a $470 million surplus and paid him about $8.34 million in FY2024, while Lown ranks his flagship near last in the country on equity and community benefit. As 2026 AHA chair, he led the fights to protect exactly the revenue streams his own system uses: 340B margins, facility fees and opaque pricing. He hands the gavel to Bill Gassen in January 2027 but stays on the AHA's executive leadership as Immediate Past Chair.
Eric D. Fish, MD, MBA, FACOG
President & CEO | Schneck Medical Center
Fish is the physician who crossed fully to the institutional side. After a one-year fill-in seat, he has won a full AHA term starting in 2027, alongside an AHA regional policy board chair and a seat on the Indiana Hospital Association board. His county-owned hospital is profitable and asset-rich ($488 million in net position), but it provides token charity care and leans on Medicaid nursing-home supplemental payments that exceed its operating income. The county structure keeps his own pay off any public 990.
Gerald "J.P." Gallagher
President & CEO | Endeavor Health
Gallagher is a career consolidator. NorthShore's Highland Park merger was found anticompetitive, regulators blocked its Advocate merger, the Edward-Elmhurst deal created Endeavor, and now Rush. Each step builds market leverage in Chicagoland, while the flagship hospital takes in roughly four times more in tax breaks than it returns and Gallagher collects $5 million to $6 million a year. The 2026 nurse union fight and the Ortega settlement show a system that protects the institution first.
Bill Gassen
President & CEO | Sanford Health
Bill Gassen is a corporate lawyer turned CEO who has grown Sanford past $11.7 billion in revenue by absorbing Marshfield in 2025 and North Memorial in 2026, after regulators blocked or derailed two earlier deals. His own pay rose 53% to about $5 million in FY2024, the year before Sanford's operating margin collapsed to 1.8%. In January 2027 he becomes AHA chair while also sitting on HHS/CMS's federal advisory committee, chairing the AHA's 501(c)(4) and serving on an insurer's board. That puts the hospital lobby's top officer inside the agency that sets its rates.
Charles Gressle
President, East Florida Division | HCA Healthcare
Charles Gressle is a career HCA operator who has run the chain's East Florida Division since 2019 and joins the AHA board in 2027. He represents a for-profit company that earned $6.8 billion in 2025, paid its CEO $26.5 million, spends more than $5 million a year on federal lobbying and, in mid-2026, offset exchange-coverage losses with about $400 million of mostly Florida Medicaid supplemental payments. HCA's record includes the unresolved North Carolina attorney general suit over Mission Health, a 2026 negligent-security suit at Palms West and quality concerns at South Florida hospitals. His seat shows how closely AHA's subsidy agenda now tracks the interests of the largest investor-owned chains.
Lisa Shannon
President & CEO | Allina Health
Shannon runs a $6 billion nonprofit that has lost money on operations for three straight years and is now handing itself to Sutter Health in a $26 billion cross-market merger, with her staying in charge. On her watch Allina has cut rural obstetric and pediatric services, sold off its lab business and fought first contracts with doctors and nurses, while executive pay climbed. Her AHA seat lets her shape the federal protections that make this kind of consolidation pay.
Michael O. Ugwueke, MPH, DHA, FACHE
President & CEO | Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare
Ugwueke runs a faith-branded, CON-protected near-monopoly in Memphis with a record of aggressive patient lawsuits and a $7.25 million kickback settlement. His standing inside the hospital establishment has only risen: AHA Executive Committee, a full AHA term through 2029, THA chair and ACHE chair-elect. MLH's federal lobbying targets the 340B program and outpatient payment rates, the subsidies the AHA exists to defend. Reform at MLH has come only after outside exposure, never before.
Steve Walsh
President & CEO | American Hospital Association
Steve Walsh is a career Massachusetts insider. He was a six-term legislator who wrote the state's hospital cost-control law, then ran two hospital trade groups, then sat on the commission his own law created while still the industry's top lobbyist. At MHA he defended hospitals against rate caps and benchmark enforcement as costs grew at more than twice the target, and his pay rose to $1.62 million. The AHA board picked him to bring that playbook to Washington.
Debra Albert, DNP, RN
Chief Nursing Officer & Senior Vice President, Patient Care Services | NYU Langone Health
NYU Langone is a $15.4 billion academic system whose hospitals earned a 7.5% margin in FY2025. It carries a top-three national fair-share deficit and paid its former CEO about $20.7 million in FY2024, and it is represented on the AHA board by its chief nurse. Albert gives the AHA a clinician face while her employer triples its federal lobbying, sues HHS over DSH dollars and settles with the Justice Department.
Robert W. (Rob) Allen
President & CEO | Intermountain Health
Allen is a career Intermountain operator whose own pay jumped to about $9.7 million in FY2024 while he ran an $18.5 billion, vertically integrated nonprofit that earned $515 million on operations in 2025. In 2026 the system cut jobs and closed clinics in Colorado and Montana despite those profits. Intermountain spends modestly on its own lobbying and leans on the AHA, where Allen now sits as a trustee, to defend 340B, DSH and tax-exemption protections.
Joan Coffman, FACHE
President & CEO | St. Tammany Health System
Coffman runs a public hospital district that claims nonprofit virtue and 'no taxpayer dollars' while taking federal grants, paying lobbyists to win federal funding, and avoiding the 990 disclosure that would put her roughly $1 million pay and its thin charity care in plain view. She has built governance seats across every lever of Gulf South hospital power: federal lobbying (AHA), state lobbying (incoming LHA chair), purchasing (Vizient), contracting (Ochsner's network) and economic policy (Committee of 100). With Ochsner's CEO now also on the AHA board, the Louisiana incumbents have a doubled voice in Washington.
Melinda S. Hancock
Executive Vice President & Chief Financial Officer | Sentara Health
Hancock is the AHA board's purest finance insider: a CPA, former HFMA chair and now CFO of a vertically integrated system that is both payer and provider across much of Virginia. In 2026 Sentara used that leverage in a public rate war with Anthem, threatening out-of-network status for 380,000 members, and beat a False Claims suit over its 2018 ACA premiums. A $14 billion system reporting under 3% of revenue as community benefit is exactly what the AHA's tax-exemption defense is built to protect.
Leslie (Les) Hirsch, FACHE
President & CEO | Saint Peter's Healthcare System
Hirsch is the trade-association insider type: a career CEO who has led four hospital systems in three states and stacked state PAC, regional AHA and national AHA roles on top of a roughly $2.05 million tax-exempt salary. His hospital doubled its net income in 2024 and won a credit upgrade, yet still seeks state appropriations and, since 2026, a federal earmark. Two failed merger attempts show he has kept shopping the independent hospital to bigger systems.
Stacey Hughes
Executive Vice President, Government Relations & Public Policy | American Hospital Association
Stacey Hughes is a Senate-staff-to-K-Street lobbyist who went from billing AHA as an outside consultant to running its government relations, while her former firm stays on AHA's lobbying payroll. She is a named lobbyist on every AHA LDA report from 2025 through Q3 2026, covering 340B, site-neutral, tax-exemption and Medicaid financing. Her 2024 package of about $1.99 million rose in a deficit year, and her public message on affordability points at everyone in health care except hospitals.
Laura S. Kaiser
President & CEO | SSM Health
Laura Kaiser runs SSM Health, a $12.7 billion Catholic system that now books a fifth of its revenue from a pharmacy benefit business, and she is in line to chair the AHA in 2028. Her pay rose nearly fivefold to about $7.9 million in 2024, a money-losing year for SSM, and she holds outside board seats at a device maker and a PBM. She is a Catholic Health Association veteran and AHA insider who embodies the vertically integrated, tax-exempt conglomerate the AHA defends.
Vicki Lewis, FACHE
President & CEO | Coffee Regional Medical Center
Lewis is the AHA board's rural community-hospital face, a nurse-trained executive who has run a 98-bed Georgia hospital since 2014 while climbing the Georgia Hospital Association and AHA advocacy ladder. Her pay has risen far faster than her hospital's revenue, and CRMC relies in part on Georgia's dollar-for-dollar HEART tax credit to raise money. Her seat gives the AHA a sympathetic rural story to tell in Washington, even as the trade group's agenda is driven by large systems.
Brian Peters
President & CEO | Michigan Health & Hospital Association
Peters is a career hospital lobbyist who has never worked outside the Michigan Health & Hospital Association and now helps govern the national lobby. He was paid about $1.51 million in FY2025, sits on the board of the state's dominant insurer while representing the hospitals that bill it, and runs a state PAC whose largest check goes to the AHA's own federal PAC. Together with Corewell and Trinity, he gives Michigan's hospital incumbents an unusually large voice at the AHA.
Michael A. Slubowski
President & CEO | Trinity Health
Slubowski runs one of the largest Catholic systems in the country as a balance-sheet machine: $17.4 billion in cash, a $2.3 billion surplus, and a CEO paid $7.3 million, alongside shrinking charity care and job cuts. Publicly he is a leading voice against Medicaid cuts and for the 340B program; in LDA filings Trinity fights 340B transparency and the Tax Exempt Hospital Transparency Act. His AHA seat ties Trinity's lobbying agenda directly to the industry's.
Erik Wexler
President & CEO | Providence
Erik Wexler, a former Tenet regional executive, took over Providence in 2025 after a 67% raise to $8.59 million. His turnaround has relied on about 5,000 job cuts, selling off nursing homes, home health and IT units, winding down the health plan and closing acute care at a coastal hospital, which returned the system to thin operating gains in 2026. Providence's record includes a $157.8 million Washington charity care settlement and a 2026 retirement plan settlement. On the AHA board he represents a large tax-exempt system that is cutting services and staff while paying executives at for-profit levels.
Chris DeRienzo, MD
Senior Vice President and Chief Physician Executive, AHA; President, Health Research & Educational Trust | American Hospital Association
Chris DeRienzo is AHA's physician face and head of its research affiliate, paid about $1.06 million in 2024. He also sits on the board of Mednition, a hospital AI vendor backed by the AHA Innovation Fund, and is listed as an adviser to the fund's manager, Concord Health Partners. He talks about quality and physician well-being while AHA lobbies to keep physician-owned hospitals banned and facility fees intact, and he has stayed silent on both.
Leah M. Glasgo
Market President | UnityPoint Health-Fort Dodge
Glasgo is the AHA board's rural nurse-turned-executive, used to make the rural hospital case to Congress. The 990s show a system-level executive paid $600,000 to $1.17 million a year to run a profitable regional hub, while UnityPoint consolidates competitors, outsources back-office jobs and hires a Grassley alum to protect the 340B program and Medicare money. The rural framing obscures a hub-and-spoke system whose strategy is scale.
Chad Golder
General Counsel and Secretary | American Hospital Association
Chad Golder is the AHA's chief litigator, a former senior DOJ lawyer and Munger Tolles partner who now sues HHS on the hospital lobby's behalf. On his watch AHA killed HRSA's first 340B rebate pilot in court and is back in the District of Maine to stop the revised version due Jan. 1, 2027. His promotion brought a roughly 34% raise to about $1.22 million in 2024, in a year AHA lost $22.6 million.
Michelle Hood
Executive Vice President & Chief Operating Officer, AHA; President & CEO, Health Forum | American Hospital Association
Michelle Hood is the AHA's operating chief and the executive who runs Health Forum, the association's for-profit monetization arm. A former member-system CEO and AHA trustee who moved onto the staff payroll in 2020, she survived the Pollack-to-Walsh transition intact. Her 2024 pay of about $1.97 million rose even as AHA posted a $22.6 million deficit, and the 990 shows the nonprofit alone paying her to run a for-profit subsidiary.
William M. Jennings
Senior Vice President, Hartford HealthCare; President, Fairfield Region | Hartford HealthCare
William Jennings is a career hospital executive who has run both of Bridgeport's hospitals for the two systems that control Connecticut's market, first Yale's Bridgeport Hospital and since 2021 Hartford HealthCare's St. Vincent's, which ran about $77 million in deficits over 2021-2023. His employer, a $7.13 billion system, faces pending federal and state antitrust suits over anti-steering and all-or-nothing contracting and settled a rival's monopolization suit in 2025, even as it bought two more hospitals in January 2026. He joins the AHA board in 2027 as a regional executive of a consolidating system whose market power is being litigated.
Pete November
President & CEO | Ochsner Health
Pete November is a CPA and lawyer who rose through Ochsner's finance office and now runs Louisiana's dominant tax-exempt system. Under him Ochsner went from a 2022 loss to a $243 million net gain in 2024, helped by 770 layoffs, while his own pay climbed to more than $7 million in total compensation. Ochsner keeps a steady seven-figure federal lobbying operation and widens its regional footprint through affiliations rather than reviewable mergers. His AHA seat gives a high-paid Gulf Coast nonprofit executive a vote on the industry's federal lobbying agenda.
Robert Vissers, MD
President & CEO | Boulder Community Health
Vissers runs a roughly $490 million independent nonprofit hospital in one of Colorado's wealthiest counties and gives the AHA board its token 'independent community hospital' seat. He is a former chair of the Colorado hospital lobby, earns about $1.25 million, and leads a system whose charity care remains opaque and whose physician network dissolved at the end of 2025.
Lisa Kidder Hrobsky
Senior Vice President, Federal Relations, Advocacy and Political Affairs | American Hospital Association
Lisa Kidder Hrobsky runs the AHA's day-to-day federal lobbying and its PAC, and is a named lobbyist on every AHA disclosure from 2025 through Q3 2026. AHAPAC under her has moved into independent expenditures and is spending down its cash. Her 2024 pay of about $866,000 is modest by AHA standards, but she is the operational hand behind AHA's defense of the 340B program, facility fees and Medicaid provider-tax financing.
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