Philip Caper, MS & MD
Philip Caper received his BA, MS and MD degrees at UCLA, and was trained in Internal Medicine on the Harvard Medical Unit at Boston City Hospital. He and has held professorships at Dartmouth Medical School and the University of Massachusetts Medical School (where he was also Vice-Chancellor for Health Affairs, Chief of the Medical Staff and Hospital Director), has been an adjunct lecturer on Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health, a Research Associate at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and an Associate in Health Policy and Management at The Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.
From 1971 to 1976, he was a professional staff member on the United States Senate Labor and Public Welfare’s Subcommittee on Health, chaired by Senator Edward Kennedy. Dr Caper was a charter member of the nation’s top health care advisory panel, the National Council on Health Planning and Development (created by PL93-641) from 1977 to 1984, chairing the panel from 1980 to 1984. He was also founder and chairman of the Codman Group (1986-2001), a health care software and consulting company with an international reputation and clientele. Codman pioneered the use of PC-based statistical data to provide its clients with detailed information about the costs and quality of medical care used by defined populations. Clients included over 20 Blue-Cross/Blue Shield companies, and over a dozen state health departments, data agencies and Medicaid programs. In 1992, The Codman Group was named one of the 100 most innovative companies in the world by The Wall Street Journal.
He is a founding member of the National Academy of Social Insurance. For 20 years, he was a member of the Board of Directors of The Medical Foundation (now Health Resources in Action), a Boston-based health care organization whose mission is the promotion of public health and advancement of medical research. He currently serves on the Board of Maine AllCare, the PNHP chapter in Maine, a group advocating for a universal improved Medicare-for-All program for the state of Maine and has been a member of the national board of Physicians For A National Health Program.
He has published numerous articles in professional journals, including The New England Journal of Medicine, The Journal of the American Medical Association, Business and Health, The American Journal of Public Health, The Journal of Public Health Policy and Health Affairs where he served on the Editorial Advisory Board from its founding to 2003. He has also written numerous letters to the editor and op-ed articles advocating for a publicly run universal health care program for Maine and the U.S., and from 2011 to 2015 was a regular monthly columnist for the Bangor Daily News, Maine’s second-largest paper, where he writes about health policy.