John E. McDonough

John E. McDonough, DrPH, MPA is a professor of public health practice at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. In 2010, he was the Joan H. Tisch Distinguished Fellow in Public Health at Hunter College in New York City. Between 2008 and 2010, he served as a Senior Advisor on National Health Reform to the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. Between 2003 and 2008, he served as Executive Director of Health Care For All, Massachusetts’ leading consumer health advocacy organization. From 1998 through 2003, he was an Associate Professor at the Heller School at Brandeis University. From 1985 to 1997, he served as a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives where he co-chaired the Joint Committee on Health Care.

His articles have appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, Health Affairs and other journals. He has written three books: 1. Inside National Health Reform, published in July 2011 by the University of California Press and the Milbank Fund; 2. Experiencing Politics: A Legislator’s Stories of Government and Health Care by the University of California Press and the Milbank Fund in 2000; and 3. Interests, Ideas, and Deregulation: The Fate of Hospital Rate Setting by the University of Michigan Press in 1997. His new book, America’s Wrong Turn: US Healthcare in the Neoliberal Era, will be published in August 2026 by the Johns Hopkins University Press.

He received a doctorate in public health from the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan in 1996 and a master’s in public administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard in 1990.