Enthoven, Alain (1930– )

US economist, systems analyst, and health care reformer. He pioneered the discipline of systems analysis, firstly in the field of defence and then in healthcare. His methods were adopted by several government departments and he became a proponent of the approach known as ‘managed competition’.

He was born in Oregon. He studied at Stanford and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, before gaining a PhD in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He worked with the Rand Corporation and then joined the Defense Department and began what became the Office of Systems Analysis. While serving as a director of Georgetown University, 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 in 1969 and by 1971 he was president of Litton Medical Products. He then joined Stanford's Graduate School of Business as a professor 1973–2000 and took on a consulting position with Kaiser-Permanente, the USA's largest HMO. At this time, too, he had begun to meet regularly with the Jackson Hole Group, a group of health care professionals who met in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to discuss reforming the USA's medical delivery system. In the years that followed, he became acknowledged as one of the prime analysts of health care reform.