Alain Enthoven, PhD

Professor Emeritus, Public and Private Management Stanford University

Alain began his teaching career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Eventually, he moved to the Department of Defense, where he held several positions leading to an appointment, by President Lyndon Johnson, to the position of Assistant Secretary of Defense for Systems Analysis. Alain also served as a consultant to the administration of President Jimmy Carter, where he designed and proposed Consumer Choice Health Plan, a plan for universal health insurance based on managed competition in the private sector.

Alain joined the Stanford faculty in 1973 and has since focused his teaching on health care. In 1988, he gave the de Vries Lectures at Erasmus University on the topic “Theory and Practice of Managed Competition in Health Care Finance.” He served as the Rock Carling Fellow at the Nuffield Trust in London from 1998 to 1999. In 1999, the Nuffield Trust published his monograph “In Pursuit of an Improving National Health Service,” which presented the case for continuing incentives reform in the NHS. In 2006, he gave the Keynote Address for the Dutch/Flemish Association of Health Economists at their tenth Annual Conference at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, entitled “Consumer Choice of Health Plan: Connecting Insurers and Providers in Systems."

Alain holds degrees in Economics from Stanford, Oxford, and MIT.