Anne F. Weiss, M.P.P., is a senior program officer and team director of the Foundation’s Quality/Equality Health Care Team. Drawn to the Foundation by its high standards for intellectual honesty and its willingness to take risks to improve health care, Weiss believes that the Quality/Equality Health Care team’s strategy represents a dramatically new approach in which RWJF will seek to have a “focused impact in a few target communities in which we can bring to bear many of the different strategies the Foundation has tried over the years to really demonstrate an impact on quality of care.” She describes this approach as one that seeks to address the inequalities in health care for individuals from specific racial, ethnic, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds, increase sustained local collaboration to achieve high-quality health care, create greater transparency about what health care is and what it costs, and devote substantial resources to research, tracking, and evaluation.  

Weiss joined the Foundation in 1999, after a distinguished career in health care policy at both the federal and state level. She served as senior assistant commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services, where she directed the state’s oversight of managed care plans and hospital indigent care. During her tenure, the Department of Health and Senior Services worked with surgeons and cardiologists throughout the state to issue New Jersey’s first report card on health choices. She also served as executive director of New Jersey’s Health Care Reform Commission, where she directed implementation of a subsidized health benefits program for the working uninsured.  Previously, Weiss spent 10 years in Washington, D.C., as a member of professional staff to the United States Senate Committee on Finance and as a senior examiner with the Office of Management and Budget. She also has served as a program analyst in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, was a member of the steering committee of the National Academy for State Health Policy, and served on the board of the National Association of Health Data Organizations.

Born in Detroit, Weiss received her M.P.P. from the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and a B.A. in history and political science from Wellesley College. She and her husband, Michael Livingston, a law professor at Rutgers University School of Law - Camden, live in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania. They have two children.

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