Bill Cox is president and CEO of the Alliance of Catholic Health Care. Based in Sacramento, CA, the Alliance is a statewide forum in which Catholic health care leaders collaborate to strengthen and promote the Catholic mission in health care by engaging in leadership formation, church relations, ethics and advocacy. The Alliance’s membership is comprised of four health systems and three independent hospitals. Together, they operate 54 Catholic and community-based hospitals in California. Prior to joining the Alliance, Bill served as executive vice president of the Catholic Health Association, Washington, D.C.
Bill has over thirty years of national and state-level experience as an innovative leader in health care. He envisioned and led the effort to develop the Social Accountability Budget for Not-for-Profit Health Care, which is the state of the art tool for hospital community benefit planning, budgeting and reporting; established the Catholic health ministry as a national leader in the movement to reform the U.S. health care system; and led five Catholic health care systems in the western United States in the development of the Sacramento-based Ministry Leadership Center (MLC). The Center’s purpose is to strengthen Catholic health care’s mission through an experienced-based, theologically sound three-year formation program for senior managers. To date, more than 500 senior health care executives from six Catholic health care systems have completed the program. Bill serves on the MLC board and conducts MLC sessions on care of the poor. More recently, Bill played a key leadership role in restructuring the governance of a large California-based health system by serving as an adviser and interface between the system’s leadership and the Archbishop of San Francisco and other bishops in the western United States.
In other areas, Bill enabled Catholic systems to develop and adopt a statewide model policy on hospital billing and collection practices for low-income patients; enabled Catholic systems to develop a model policy on statewide health care reform; helped defeat state legislation that would have imposed onerous requirements on accessing the tax-exempt bond market; defeated legislation that would have required Catholic hospitals to provide services inconsistent with their religious and ethical beliefs; and designed and helped lead the statewide campaign that successfully delayed by five years implementation of California’s inordinately expensive hospital earthquake requirements.
Bill is on the boards of directors of the Ministry Leadership Center (Sacramento, CA), Providence Hospital (Washington, DC), where he serves as board chair, and the Alliance for Advancing Not-for-Profit Health Care (Washington, D.C.). He is a member of the California Catholic Conference’s Committee on Religious Liberty and is a member of the United States Catholic Conference’s Doctrine Committee’s Subcommittee on Health Care. He received an honorary doctorate from the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology, Berkeley, CA in May 2012.
Bill graduated from the University of Notre Dame with honors.