To mark the start of National Public Health Week, Yale School of Public Health Dean Megan L. Ranney, MD, MPH, sat down with Chris Klomp, chief counselor at Health and Human Services, and deputy administrator and director of Medicare at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
The conversation was the final event in the 2026 Leaders in Public Health speakers series and explored Klomp’s professional journey, the complexity of the U.S. health care system, and the role of academia in shaping the future of public health.
Klomp said his perspective is grounded in a simple belief: “If there’s one issue that shouldn’t be partisan in our country — that should not be red or blue, left or right — it is health.”
His own sense of responsibility began at home. Klomp felt called to health care at an early age, influenced by his father’s belief that “being a healer is the highest calling.” Today, he frames his work not just as a career, but as a form of stewardship. “Our job in government is not to solve all of the problems,” he said, “but to create an environment through policy and funding to empower the most brilliant minds to answer those questions.”
Ranney, who has known Klomp for more than a decade, described him as a value-driven leader. Klomp emphasized the importance of staying connected to the people affected by policy, saying he calls patients and responds directly to emails. “It’s a gorgeous example of centering humanity,” Ranney said. “If you are just sitting in your ivory tower, you lose touch,” she added.
That commitment to ground-level connection also shapes how Klomp thinks about his life outside government. Splitting his time between Washington, D.C., and Utah, where he lives with his wife and four children, he underscored that fatherhood is his top priority. “When you become a parent, the social contract is that you’re going to make the world better for your children than how you found it,” he said. “But in health care, that is not what has happened.” Noting that six out of 10 people in the U.S. live with chronic disease, and half have multiple conditions, he added, “We are objectively leaving the world worse than how we got it.”
Understanding why requires grappling with a system of staggering complexity — something Klomp knows from both sides of the public-private divide.
"Health care is so stunningly complex and large, with so many moving parts, that it's very hard to see it from a systems perspective," he said. "You flick an upstairs light switch and the downstairs toilet flushes."
Earlier in his career, Klomp addressed that complexity as CEO of Collective Medical, a health IT company whose care coordination platform helped providers communicate more effectively across fragmented systems. Ranney said the network Klomp built gave doctors — including emergency doctors like herself — “the tools to identify and provide real public health services to patients so they stopped coming back to the emergency department over and over again.”
From the private sector, Klomp brought that systems thinking into government. He is now applying it to a question academia is well positioned to help answer: how do you rebuild a health system people can trust?
When asked what role universities can play, Klomp pointed to the National Institutes of Health as a critical bridge between research and real-world impact. The country’s $40 billioninvestment in research, conducted through scientists at institutions like YSPH, exists, he said, with one core objective: “answering questions that alleviate human suffering.”
But beyond generating knowledge, he argued, academia has a distinct responsibility to rebuild public trust. That means strengthening communication, collaborating beyond institutional boundaries, and ensuring research reaches communities in meaningful ways. “We want the public to have trust in these important institutions,” Klomp said.
He closed with a charge to the students in the room. "We need people in public health," he said. "We need brilliant minds who want to sign up for this work."