PolicyLab

Ahaviah (“Havi”) Glaser is the senior policy advisor at PolicyLab and the associate vice president of government affairs and advocacy at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). Ms. Glaser comes to CHOP with more than two decades of health law and policy experience. She is a seasoned public policy advisor, who recently served on Capitol Hill as Senator Rockefeller’s Senior Health Counsel as well as the Staff Director for the Senate Finance Committee’s Subcommittee on Health Care. Ms. Glaser is known for her expertise across public health insurance programs with a particular focus on the intersection of these programs, such as Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) or Medicaid and Medicare. 

With a background in ­­intellectual property and antitrust litigation, Ms. Glaser has been active on private market insurance reform as well as pharmaceutical pricing issues. On and off the Hill, Ms. Glaser has worked to identify concerns raised by health information technology, including challenges related to interoperability and privacy. She also worked closely with the Senate Commerce Committee to raise concerns regarding e-cigarettes and the ongoing challenge of finding a way to stop the marketing of tobacco to children. The very first health care issue Ms. Glaser worked on was health disparities, and the issue remains a central one in her work to this day.

As an attorney, Ms. Glaser has represented companies ranging from new startups to industry-defining giants in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and high technology fields both in court and before federal agencies, most commonly Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). She has also navigated the legislative landscape, not only in her Congressional staff roles but also on behalf of nonprofit groups, big and small, from state-based health care advocacy groups to the nation’s largest consumer groups, unions and non-profit insurers.

Ms. Glaser believes strongly that there are policy solutions for nearly every problem. It is simply a matter of taking the time to develop a full understanding of the problem at hand and then identifying appropriate opportunities to work with partners and across party lines in a thoughtful way. With this in mind, much of her policy experience, both on and off the Hill, has been in helping to assemble diverse coalitions to tackle nuanced health policy challenges.

Ms. Glaser has been a frequent public speaker, and she served for nearly a decade as an adjunct professor of health law at American University’s Washington College of Law. She earned her J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School and her B.S., with honors, from the University of California at Berkeley. She is admitted to practice in Washington, DC, California, Massachusetts and numerous federal courts across the country.