George C. Halvorson

George Halvorson is the Chair and CEO of the Institute for InterGroup Understanding, an organization that works on issues of racism, prejudice, discrimination, misogyny and InterGroup stress and conflict. He has served for more than 30 years as CEO of six different healthcare delivery and financing organizations in the U.S. and helped start similar organizations in several other countries. He personally spent time in Uganda and Jamaica starting health plans and guiding them to operational status.

Halvorson has authored seven books on healthcare reform, the most recent, Ending Racial, Ethnic and Cultural Disparities in American Health Care, discusses the major disparities that exist by race and ethnicity in American healthcare today, and explains how to either end those disparities or prevent them from happening.

His book Three Key Years addresses early childhood issues and identifies how the issues of early brain development affect parents, families, educators, community leaders, policymakers, caregivers, and most importantly, children. Halvorson's penultimate healthcare book, Don't Let Health Care Bankrupt America, deals with the importance of early brain development in children from all groups in America, and explains the particular importance of those early childhood brain development issues.

Halvorson served most recently as Kaiser Permanente Chairman and CEO from 2002 – 2014, before retiring from CEO in July 2013, and Chairman in January 2014. Currently, he is Chair of the First 5 Commission for Children and Families for the State of California. In 2013, Governor Jerry Brown appointed Halvorson to a four-year term and then reappointed him to another four years in 2017. The Commission uses roughly $500 million each year raised from tobacco taxes to provide support and education to children in California from birth to 5 years old. Halvorson is a member of the Right Start Commission for Children for the State of California, and he currently serves as a member of the ReadyNation CEO Task Force on Early Childhood.