Alain Enthoven

Economist, systems analyst, and health-care reformer, born in Seattle, Oregon, USA. The son of an English father and French mother, the family settled in Seattle. He studied economics at Stanford, was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, then took a PhD in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1956). He worked with the Rand Corp (1956–61), where he pioneered the multi-disciplinary approach to problems known as ‘systems analysis’. He then joined the Defence Department and began what became the Office of Systems Analysis (1961–9). Originally applied to defence problems, systems analysis was soon adopted by many branches of government. While also serving as a director of Georgetown University in the late 1960s, he became involved in creating the university's new health maintenance organization (HMO). Switching his focus from defence to health issues, he joined Litton Industries in California (1969) and by 1971 was president of Litton Medical Products. In 1973 he joined Stanford's Graduate School of Business, and also took on a consulting position with Kaiser-Permanente, the nation's largest HMO. He had begun to meet regularly with the so-called Jackson Hole Group started by Dr Paul Ellwood, a Minneapolis paediatric neurologist, who periodically assembled health-care professionals at his condominium in Jackson Hole, WY to discuss reforming America's medical delivery system. In the years that followed, Enthoven became acknowledged as one of the prime analysts of health-care reform, and in particular became a proponent of the approach known as ‘managed competition’.

Alain Enthoven was Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1965. Eccles Professor of Public and Private Management at Stanford Institute for International Studies.

Enthoven received his B.A.

He is a member of the Institute of Medicine, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a former Rhodes scholar.