Lois Quam
Senior Fellow
Lois Quam is a Senior Fellow at American Progress where she works on green economy, health care, economic development and rural policy issues. Lois is also the founder and CEO of Tysvar, LLC, a Minnesota-based green economy company with a particular focus on Norwegian-American collaboration.
For nearly two decades, Lois focused on enacting public policy and building companies to scale to improve health care access and affordability. She built and led Ovations, a division of UnitedHealth Group and the nation’s largest provider of health care services to older Americans. Working closely with AARP, Medicare, and state Medicaid agencies, Lois’s organization created roughly 20,000 jobs and became an international leader in developing approaches to care for chronically-ill patients.
Former Governor of Minnesota Rudy Perpich appointed her to chair the Minnesota Health Care Access Commission. In this role, she helped lead the way to new legislation that brought health insurance to tens of thousands of Minnesotans. As a result of her work in Minnesota, she served as a senior advisor to the President's Task Force on National Health Care Reform in 1993, with a particular focus on rural areas.
Lois’s concerns about global warming led her to leave her position in 2007 as a top officer of UnitedHealth Group to help build the green economy at Piper Jaffray, a leading international investment bank headquartered in Minneapolis. Lois left Piper Jaffray to establish Tysvar, LLC in April 2009.
Three times named by Fortune Magazine as one of America’s “50 Most Powerful Women” in business, Lois is on the board of the National Wildlife Federation, the Norwegian American Clean Technology Alliance, Macalester College, the University of Minnesota Foundation, the Oslo Center for Peace and Human Rights-U.S. Foundation, and General Mills. She was named Norwegian-American of the Year in 2005 and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Lois was raised in Marshall, Minnesota. She graduated magna cum laude from Macalester College and earned a master’s degree in philosophy, politics and economics as a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford.
Email: lquam /@\ americanprogress.org
Articles by Lois Quam
- For Opportunities in the New Green Economy, We Should Look to Norway, October 1, 2009
