Speakers

Richard Burr

United States Senator serving North Carolina

U.S. SENATE

First elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1994, Senator Burr served five terms in the House and is currently serving North Carolina in his third term in the U.S. Senate. During his time in the House, he led legislation modernizing the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and began his work to improve our nation’s
biodefense and pandemic preparedness capabilities.

In the Senate, he serves as Ranking Member of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. Promoting innovation in America’s health care system has been a priority for him throughout his time in Congress. Senator Burr has led on a number of significant legislative priorities, including the creation of today’s pandemic response framework through the passage and reauthorization of the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act (PAHPA), improving FDA’s ability to regulate cutting-edge treatments for patients, and consistently championing funding for medical innovation and research.

Protecting and honoring human and civil rights is another area where he has led legislatively. Senator Burr spearheaded the passage of the Stephen Beck, Jr. Achieving a Better Life Experience (ABLE) Act. This legislation allowed for individuals with disabilities to save money in their own name without losing critical benefits, including health care. In 2014, the ABLE Act was signed into law, and was widely regarded as the most significant legislative accomplishment for individuals with disabilities since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). In 2016, he worked with the late civil rights leader, Representative John Lewis (D-GA) to reauthorize the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crimes Reauthorization Act. The passage of this bill provided a critical opportunity to right the wrongs committed against African Americans that were never investigated during the Civil Rights Era.

In addition to leading Republicans on the HELP Committee, Senator Burr also serves as a senior member of the Select Committee on Intelligence, the Finance Committee, and the Special Committee on Aging.

The son of a minister, Senator Burr and his family moved to Winston-Salem, North Carolina when he was a young child. He attended Wake Forest University on a football scholarship, and after graduating, he began his career far from the halls of Congress by spending seventeen years in business with Carswell Distributing, a wholesale commercial products company.

He also serves as a Board Member of Brenner Children’s Hospital and on the West Point Board of Visitors. Senator Burr and his wife, Brooke, have two sons. 

Jarrett Lewis

Partner

Public Opinion Strategies

Jarrett Lewis is a Partner at Public Opinion Strategies, a national political and public affairs research firm, whose clients include leading political figures, Fortune 500 companies, and major associations. The firm is also part of the bi-partisan research team that conducts the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. Jarrett’s work is heavily rooted in the health care industry and he has extensive experience conducting survey research and providing advisory services for large health systems and health care companies.

Jarrett was previously Executive Director of Health Policy at The Health Management Academy, a network of executive leaders from the 100-largest hospital systems across the US In that role he advised C-Suite hospital system executives on federal policy initiatives and strategy. He also created and led a business unit offering advisory services to health system executives using proprietary survey research data in areas of business development, marketing, budgeting and health policy. Additionally, he directed a quarterly health care survey of 1,500 consumers, sponsored and published by the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC). He regularly speaks to health system and health care company boards of directors and leadership teams on the topics of health policy and consumerism in health care.

Jarrett began his career at Public Opinion Strategies, providing survey research analysis to federal and state campaigns during the 2008 election cycle. He worked for Public Opinion Strategies again during the 2012 election cycle, serving as a strategist and pollster to the Romney for President Campaign from 2011-2012. In that role Jarrett provided in-depth analysis of internal survey research data to senior campaign officials, including over 300 surveys and 150 focus groups.

Jarrett is a RIVA-trained focus group moderator and has moderated or managed over 200 focus groups in his career. He has an MBA from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University and a BA in Political Science from Clemson University, where he was a member of the men’s varsity soccer team. He lives in Alexandria, Virginia with his wife Elise and their son.

Mark McClellan, MD, PhD

Director and Robert J. Margolis, MD, Professor of Business, Medicine and Policy

Duke-Margolis

Mark McClellan, MD, PhD is the Robert J. Margolis Professor of Business, Medicine, and Health Policy, and founding Director of the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy at Duke University.

McClellan is a physician and an economist who has informed and improved a wide range of strategies and policy reforms to advance health care, including payment reform to promote better outcomes and lower costs, methods for development and use of real-world evidence, and strategies for more effective biomedical innovation. Before coming to Duke, he served as a Senior Fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution, where he was Director of the Health Care Innovation and Value Initiatives and led the Richard Merkin Initiative on Payment Reform and Clinical Leadership.

With highly distinguished record in public service and academic research, McClellan is a former administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), where he developed and implemented major reforms in health policy. These reforms include the Medicare prescription drug benefit, Medicare and Medicaid payment reforms, the FDA’s Critical Path Initiative, and public-private initiatives to develop better information on the quality and cost of care. He previously served as a member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, senior director for health care policy at the White House, and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy at the Department of the Treasury.

McClellan is the founding chair and a current board member of the Reagan-Udall Foundation for the FDA and a member of the National Academy of Medicine (NAM), where he chairs the Leadership Council for Value and Science-Driven Health care, co-chairs the guiding committee of the Health Care Payment Learning and Action Network, and is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is also a Senior Advisor on the faculty of the University of Texas Dell Medical School, co-chair of the Accountable Care Learning Collaborative, and a member of the Healthtech 4 Medicaid Board of Directors. McClellan is also an independent director on the boards of Johnson & Johnson, Cigna, Alignment Healthcare, and Seer. He was previously an associate professor of economics and medicine with tenure at Stanford University, and has twice received the Kenneth Arrow Award for Outstanding Research in Health Economics.

David Ridley, PhD

Faculty Director

Duke Health Sector Management

David Ridley, PhD is the Dr. and Mrs. Frank A. Riddick Professor of the Practice of Business. He is also the Faculty Director of Duke’s Health Sector Management. Ridley teaches in the daytime MBA, executive MBA, and Health Analytics programs. He received a PhD in economics from Duke University in 2001.

In his research, Ridley examines innovation and pricing in health care. To encourage development of new treatments for neglected diseases, Ridley (with Jeff Moe and Henry Grabowski) proposed the priority review voucher program which became law in the United States in 2007. Total voucher sales have exceeded one billion dollars. Ridley’s research appears in economics journals (Journal of Public Economics), medical journals (Journal of the American Medical Association), and scientific journals (Nature Reviews Drug Discovery).

David Price, PhD

Member serving the 4th District of North Carolina

U.S. CONGRESS

David Price represents North Carolina’s Fourth District – a rapidly growing, research-and-education-focused district that includes parts of Orange, Durham, and Wake counties. He received his undergraduate degree at UNC-Chapel Hill and went on to Yale University to earn a Bachelor of Divinity and PhD in Political Science. Before he began serving in Congress in 1987, Price was a professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Duke University. He is the author of four books on Congress and the American political system.

Price currently serves on the House Appropriations Committee and is the ranking member of the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development Appropriations Subcommittee. He is also a member of the Appropriations subcommittees covering homeland security, State Department, and foreign operations funding. He is a recognized leader in foreign policy, co-chairing the House Democracy Partnership, which he initiated to help strengthen parliaments in emerging democracies. In North Carolina, Prices’s constituents know him as a strong supporter of education, accessible health care, affordable housing, clean air and water, and improved transportation alternatives.

Price is a native of Erwin, Tennessee and resides in Chapel Hill. He and his late wife, Lisa are the parents of two children and three grandchildren.