CEO DOSSIER
Mark Bertolini is a fighter, working his way up from humble beginnings and battling back from a near-death experience on the ski slopes to take charge of the U.S’s third largest health insurer. But how will he steer Aetna through the challenges of health care reform?
early years
Originally from Detroit, Mark worked his way through high school and college, working at a car factory and in various caregiver jobs in the health care industry. When he was a sophomore at Wayne State University he dropped out and trained as a paramedic, becoming an emergency room co-ordinator at Detroit’s St John Hospital trauma center.
But when he got married in 1979 he decided to return to university and he graduated from Wayne State University with a degree in business administration and finance and achieved an MBA in finance from Cornell University.
It was his experiences as a young man working in the health care system, which influenced his aspirations to improve the experience of patients in the U.S.
He worked as an executive vice president at NYLCare Health Plans before becoming Chief Executive Officer at SelectCare, Inc. He then went to Cigna Healthcare, where he held the roles of senior vice president of national sales and delivery network and senior vice president of operations and technology.
Mark joined health care benefits company Aetna in 2003 as head of its specialty products. He went on to become Executive Vice President and head of Aetna’s regional businesses. In July 2007, he was named President, responsible for all of Aetna’s businesses and operations, which include medical, pharmacy, dental and disability plans, as well as health care management services for Medicaid plans.
He took over the role of CEO in November 2010 and also became Chairman in April 2011.
As ceo
In 2011 Aetna had revenue of $33.7 billion, operations in North America, Asia, Europe and the Middle East and around 34,000 employees.
As CEO Mark has been looking at ways to improve health care, while also making it cheaper. Aetna has been involved in 57 pilot schemes to test out potential ways of achieving this and the firm is now involved in 10 accountable care organisations, where doctors are paid for the quality of their work and not the quantity. Mark is looking at signing Aetna up to participate in more of these types of programmes.
He says: “We’re really working right now on the underlying cost of health care. These investments we’re making are about finding a different way to make models work. We’re committed to fixing that, and feel like we need to fix that.”
He has raised his own profile as CEO by starting a Twitter account, which has earned him praise, criticism and 2,000 followers.
He says: “It's a much friendlier way to communicate. There's less possibility of misinterpretation. It humanizes the role of the CEO and the company and makes this a much harder organisation to attack, because it's easier to attack buildings with names on them than it is to attack people.”
Mark wants to see a more collaborative approach to health care in the U.S. and saw Barack Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act as a positive step to improving the way Aetna did business.
He says: “If the Affordable Care Act were to go away tomorrow, we still would be better off as an organisation, because who can argue with getting a lower health-care delivery cost, more streamlined administrative structure, making yourself simpler and less complex to do business with?”
“We're trying to redefine quality in health care as convenience. The health care system should be really easy to use. My data should be available for whoever I want to share it with, and I should be able to access appointments and find doctors in a way that works for me.”
Mark also wants to introduce a way in which people can find doctors who are available for appointments that day in their area.
In 2012 Mark announced Aetna’s acquisition of Coventry Health Care for $7.3 billion as part of the company’s strategy to expand its Medicaid and commercial lines revenue.
Away from work
Mark has a lot of personal experience of the health care industry outside of his career. He survived a serious skiing accident in 2004, in which he crashed into a tree and fell down a ravine, breaking his neck, splitting his shoulder blade down the middle and damaging the nerves to his left arm.
A priest gave him his last rites but Mark pulled through and less than four weeks after he almost died, he gave a presentation for Aetna at an investor conference, using a cane to walk and with his left arm in a brace.
He has been left disabled though with a weak left arm and permanent nerve damage, which means he is in constant pain. To try and avoid having to take a cocktail of painkillers, Mark manages the pain using yoga, acupuncture and a weekly cranial sacral massage.
In 2001 his son Eric was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive cancer - Gamma Delta T-cell lymphoma – when he was just 16. The family were told there was no cure and Eric would die.
Mark says: “It was like a lightning bolt. We immediately went into survival mode as a family.”
Marks perseverance and personal research saw Eric given oestrogen called Premarin, which successfully stopped his intestinal bleeding. When Eric was unable to take the intravenous fat-based supplement he needed because he was allergic to soya, Mark sourced a fish-based supplement in Austria; working directly with the chairman of the manufacturer. His efforts paid off and in 2003 Eric went home and is now clear of the cancer.
The disease has taken its toll though and in 2007 when Eric’s kidneys started to fail, Mark donated one of own to help his son.
Mark’s personal experiences have made him a champion of people with disabilities. And he has also ended up being seen as an ally of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people too. When he saw the LGBT group at Aetna was the only one without an executive sponsor, he stepped up to the role, despite being heterosexual. In 2009, he was elected the first straight ally board member of the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce.
He serves on the Board of Directors of the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, an organisation founded by Paul Newman that serves children with cancer and other serious illnesses, and FIDELCO, an organization that breeds and trains guide dogs for the visually disabled
Despite his accident Mark still enjoys skiing and hiking.
