Career
Born to a Jewish family in Pennsylvania, and raised in the Strawberry Mansion neighborhood of Philadelphia. After graduating, he worked as a salesman for pharmaceutical company Parke-Davis. He then worked as a retail pharmacist for six years and then took a job with R.H. Medical Incorporated., a small hospital-management company then headquartered in Cheltenham, Pennsylvania where he served as vice president for corporate development.
Noting that as hospitals, doctors, and pharmacies were able to charge whatever price they wanted for their services, he developed the concept of the health maintenance organization, a new form of health plan that instead of paying doctors and hospitals on a fee-for-service basis (where they are incented to maximize the number of procedures), they would instead be paid an all-inclusive fee to maintain the health of the patient (thus incenting the health care provider to focus on the overall health of the patient and preventive care so as to avoid more costly hospital care).
In the mid-1970s, he left R.H. Medical and with the aid of $3 million in federal loans, he founded a non-profit health maintenance organization , health maintenance organization of Pennsylvania. In 1981, he abandoned the company"s nonprofit status and in 1983, he took the parent company, renamed Incorporated., public.
In 1990, Abramson published a book, Healing Our Health Care System, attacking what he perceived to be the problems of the American health care system, which he called "nothing less than a national disgrace."
Abramson headed from 1975 until 1996, when he sold it to Aetna for $8.3 billion. At the time of the sale, Abramson"s salary was $3.85 million and he held shares worth $63.2 million.
Abramson profited $900 million on the sale.
Abramson then served on Aetna"s board of directors from 1996 to 2000. Currently, Abramson is on the Board of Directors of the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotation Stock Market, Incorporated., the Board of Trustees of the Brookings Institution, and the Board of Trustees of Johns Hopkins University.
