Carl J. Schramm, Ph.D.
President and CEO, Kauffman Foundation
Biography

Carl J. Schramm is president and chief executive officer of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. Trained both as an economist and lawyer, Schramm began his career on the faculty of Johns Hopkins University and emerged as a respected thinker in health care finance, regulation, and insurance. He founded the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Care Finance and Management in 1980, the first such research center in the nation. While at Hopkins, he led the country’s only post-doctoral training program in health finance, sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. In 1987, he chaired the American Assembly on Health Care Costs and edited its volume, Health Care and Its Costs.

Schramm left the university to head the Health Insurance Association of America where many industry-wide innovations in health insurance were developed. He later became executive vice president of Fortis (now Assurant) and president of its health insurance operations. He developed several innovations at Fortis including transition coverage for recent college graduates. He has served as a board member of other U.S. and foreign insurance and reinsurance companies.

An active entrepreneur, Schramm was a cofounder of HCIA, Inc. and Patient Choice Health Care. He founded Greenspring Advisors, a consulting and merchant banking firm in the health information and risk management industries. Among the firm’s clients were insurance and reinsurance companies including Blue Cross plans, industrial firms such as Ford and Johnson & Johnson, and venture capital funds.

Besides many leading academic journals, Schramm’s work has appeared in Foreign Affairs, The Wall Street Journal and the New England Journal of Medicine. He is the author of The Entrepreneurial Imperative (HarperCollins, Oct. 2006) and is working on a second book, Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism (Yale 2007) with Will Baumol and Robert Litan. He is a contributing editor of Inc. magazine.

In addition to his graduate fellowships (New York State Regents and Ford Foundation), Schramm received two consecutive NIH Career Science Awards and was a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellow at the National Academy of Science, Institute of Medicine. He is a Batten Fellow at the Darden School of the University of Virginia, a Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He received the George Eastman Medal from the University of Rochester in 2005. In February 2007, he was appointed by Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez to chair the Measuring Innovation in the 21st Century Economy Advisory Committee.