After more than 20 years at Humana, Jeremy Gaskill now leads nonprofit Geisinger Health Plan. The problems are the same, he says, the scale for solving them differs.
After nearly 22 years at Humana, Jeremy Gaskill moved this year to a nonprofit health plan owned by a Pennsylvania health system. What he found were familiar problems and far fewer resources for solving them.
“Whether you’re a large publicly traded company in the healthcare space or a midsize, you know, private nonprofit company, it’s the same challenges,” said Gaskill, 50, who became president of Geisinger Health Plan (GHP) in February. “The same challenges in the Medicaid space. The same exact challenges in the Medicare Advantage space. Same exact challenges in the commercial space.”
At Humana, Gaskill was most recently central region president for Medicare, overseeing nine states from Kansas City, Kan. Today he runs a plan with just over 500,000 members in commercial, Medicaid and Medicare coverage. He is also executive vice president of insurance operations for Geisinger, a nonprofit system with 10 hospitals and $9 billion in annual revenue, based in Danville in the northeastern part of the state. The culture carried over easily, he said. Both companies are major employers in midsize and smaller communities, and their employees often stay for decades and sometimes meet their spouses at work.
What changed, according to Gaskill, is scale. GHP still has to earn a margin, but because it doesn’t answer to Wall Street, it can put that money back into benefits, member outcomes and growth. He also sees an advantage in a business mix that has more variety than some national payers’, which have put most of their eggs in a single line of business. With several lines, he said, the plan has more ways to work through problems with its provider partners.
The price is less room for big bets. With AI and other technology moving fast, Gaskill said, GHP can’t pour money into an initiative just to figure it out. It invests in controlled steps, accepts that some efforts will fail and pivots when they do. It is the kind of discipline Geisinger was looking for: When the system announced his hiring, president and CEO Terry Gilliland, M.D., said Gaskill had “demonstrated the ability to turn around challenged markets, lead large-scale organizational transformation and deliver sustained performance.”
