[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 156 (2010), Part 8]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page 11572]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                        TRIBUTE TO STEVE ZATKIN

                                 ______
                                 

                        HON. FORTNEY PETE STARK

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                        Wednesday, June 23, 2010

  Mr. STARK. Madam Speaker, my colleague Henry Waxman and I join 
together to mark an important occasion for California's and the 
nation's health care policy community. After leading the public policy 
and government relations team at Kaiser Permanente for the past 20 
years, Steve Zatkin has announced that he will retire at the end of 
this month. He reached this conclusion after having seen a long-awaited 
event--the enactment of comprehensive health care reform--finally come 
to pass.
  Following his graduation from the University of California at 
Berkeley in 1969, Steve began his career in health policy, like many 
other national experts, as a staff person in the California 
legislature. After starting out as an Intern and Analyst in the 
California Assembly, Steve served throughout the middle and late 1970s 
as Senior Consultant to the Assembly Health Subcommittee on Health 
Personnel, the Joint Committee on Health Sciences Education and the 
Joint Committee on the Siting of Teaching Hospitals. During his senior 
staff tenure in Sacramento, he developed major legislation and budget 
policy on health care workforce and training issues, an area of abiding 
and continuing interest for him.
  While working in the legislature, Steve earned his degree at the 
McGeorge School of Law and was admitted to the California Bar. In 1978, 
he joined Kaiser Permanente as a staff counsel focusing on government 
relations. In addition to leading Kaiser Permanente's government 
relations function since 1990, he has chaired its Health Policy 
Committee since its inception in 1996. Since 2004, he has also served 
as Senior Vice President and General Counsel of Kaiser Foundation 
Health Plan and Kaiser Foundation Hospitals.
  Steve has long been recognized as a leader in the health plan and 
integrated care delivery sector. He served on the Boards of Directors 
of the Alliance of Community Health Plans, the California Association 
of Health Plans and the American Association of Health Plans. In the 
late 1990s, Steve served on the California Governor's Managed Care 
Improvement Task Force. He has also served as a member of the National 
Association of Insurance Commissioners' Health Care Insurance Access 
Advisory Committee.
  In his role as a health plan leader, Steve has ably represented 
Kaiser Permanente as it has grown to serve over 8.6 million people, 
including over 6 million individuals in our home state of California. 
Throughout his time as a senior leader at Kaiser Permanente, Steve has 
been a strong and consistent public voice within the industry for 
comprehensive health reform. An article he co-authored in the journal 
Health Affairs in 2006 with Kaiser Permanente leaders George Halvorson 
and Dr. Jay Crosson served as a model for the exciting, if ultimately 
unsuccessful effort to enact health reform in California during the 
legislative session in 2008. The efforts in California demonstrated the 
potential to bring together health care providers, health plans, 
businesses, labor unions and consumers in support of comprehensive 
health reform legislation that could improve both the functioning of 
health markets and the quality of care, and at the same time help 
subsidize coverage for those who cannot afford it. The progress made in 
California, along with the success of reform in Massachusetts and 
strong efforts in other states, no doubt contributed important momentum 
necessary to achieve health care reform in this Congress.
  As the critical effort to implement national health reform moves 
forward, we will need industry leaders like Steve to help their 
organizations and policymakers focus on the tasks at hand--to 
continuously improve quality and to successfully extend affordable 
coverage to the millions who currently don't have access to it.
  Madam Speaker, we would like to offer the heartfelt thanks of the 
health policy community for Steve Zatkin's key leadership over many 
years, and our warmest congratulations on his well-deserved retirement. 


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