Finance and Economic

After a 25-year career as a cardiologist—and after co-founding the Prime Care Physicians group—John Bennett took over as the head of Capital District Physicians’ Health Plan on July 1.

The 54-year-old former CDPHP chairman replaced Dr. William Cromie who retired after nearly seven years due to health reasons.

The Business Review recently sat down with Bennett to talk universal care, his new job and what role health insurers could play under a universal care system. Here are the highlights.

You initially went to RPI to study chemical engineering. What did you hope to be when you first enrolled?

I entered as a freshman at age 16 [having skipped a grade in elementary school]. … I had it in my mind that I was going to design chemical process plants.

Why chemical process plants?

I was really quite specific in what I wanted, even at 16. I loved chemistry. I loved math. At that time, I was going to the library, doing research, trying to figure out how I would put math and chemistry together. I started to read books about the field and decided it was something I wanted to do. Two years later, I figured out I wanted something else.

The story goes that volunteering in the emergency room at Samaritan Hospital in Troy inspired you to go into medicine. What made you decide to volunteer in the first place?

I had to do it. I was an engineering student but was required to do some humanities courses. And I started taking a medical sociology course. They wanted you to do some work in the community in terms of health care. Samaritan Hospital was right near RPI, so I decided I would go there.

Did you go reluctantly at first?

I was probably neutral about it. But I ended up loving it. I met the doctors and the nurses. It is probably the nurses that get you excited about medicine. [He laughs.] I didn’t mean it that way. Really. What I mean by that is, as you work with the nurses, that’s where you work with the patients. That patient contact, especially as a volunteer, comes through the nurses who are showing you around cash advance loan. The doctors are almost like this abstract concept that briefly comes into the room.

When you were a med student, did you foresee your career going in this direction—becoming the head of a health insurer?

No. It was the last thing I was thinking of at that time. When I was a med student, I wanted to be a family doctor. On day one, I signed up for the family medicine program. From day one, I wanted to go to a doctor’s office and see what was going on.

Your predecessor, Bill Cromie, talked about becoming a family doctor and going back to his hometown to practice.

A lot of people start that way. Especially in those days, as a kid, those were the doctors you knew. He would come to the house with his black bag and give you your shot, make you feel better. Those were your heros.

What made you decide on cardiology in the end?

It had to do with that thing inside me that made me want to be an engineer—that tech geek. My techie side came out in cardiology. As I began to study medicine and go through my internship and residency, I gravitated to the more technical side of internal medicine. And cardiology is very technical. The heart is a mechanical pump. The heart has a wiring system and the heart has flow.

So how do you go from practicing medicine to being the head of a health insurer?

That didn’t happen overnight. It was an evolution. I went in practice in 1983, joined a three-man cardiology practice. The ’80s saw a lot of growth in cardiology. And we began to grow the practice and grow it in numbers. … And as we grew, the organization became a business. I evolved as one of the business leaders in the practice.

To some, it might seem incongruous going from being a doctor to a health insurance executive.

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