Michael Johns (executive)

Michael Johns (born September 8, 1964 in Allentown, Pennsylvania) is an American health care executive, former federal government of the United States official and conservative policy analyst and writer.

Biography
Johns was born in Allentown and graduated from Emmaus High School in Emmaus, Pennsylvania in 1982. He received a Bachelor of Business Administration from the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, where he majored in economics and graduated with honors in 1986. While there, Johns was inducted into the Iron Arrow Honor Society, the University of Miami's highest attainable honor.

He also attended Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge University in Cambridge, England. He resides currently in Deptford, New Jersey.

Health care industry
A major force in corporate health care, Johns has served with global pharmaceutical powerhouse Eli Lilly, in the health care practice of a leading Philadelphia consulting firm and, since 2000, as vice president of Gentiva Health Services, a Fortune 1000 corporation. As part of Gentiva senior management, Johns has helped lead a quintupling of the company's market capitalization and one of the largest health care acquisitions in recent years.

He also was one of several influential proponents of the Bush administration's 2006 launch of Medicare Part D, which expanded the federal Medicare program to cover pharmaceuticals for the elderly and chronically disabled, arguing that Medicare was spending too much on preventable hospitalizations and surgeries and too little on disease prevention and management.

In his health care roles, Johns has advocated a moderate course on American health care policy, supporting increased biopharmaceutical and free market health care innovation, while simultaneously defending the need to protect Medicare, Medicaid and other governmental health programs for the nation's elderly, poor and disabled.

Government and public policy
A versatile and influential advocate for many of the prominent themes of mainstream conservatism, Johns also has held high-level posts in American government and public policy. His writings on American foreign policy in the 1980s helped shape and promote the foreign policy of the Reagan administration. He was one of the original advocates of the so-called "Reagan Doctrine", successfully urging the United States to support forces opposing Soviet client states and one of the first Reagan Doctrine advocates to actually visit the front lines of these hot spots (Angola, Cambodia, Nicaragua, and the former Soviet Republics) with regularity. Johns also was a close advisor to Angola's Jonas Savimbi, whose Cold War conflict with Soviet-aligned Angola became a central Cold War sub-plot.

He is credited with helping shift Washington's intellectual tide away from containment of the Soviet Union (as advocated by post-war American leaders, such as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman) and toward a more aggressive approach dedicated to the "rollback" of global communism. Many historians now credit this latter approach with leading to, or at least accelerating, the collapse of the former Soviet Union.

Johns also was one of the most vocal U.S. conservatives in defending Ronald Reagan's controversial description of the former Soviet Union as an "evil empire." In a lengthy Policy Review article, "Seventy Years of Evil: Soviet Crimes from Lenin to Gorbachev," for instance, Johns labeled the Soviet system "history's most sophisticated apparatus of rule by terror" and lambasted its "crushing of the human spirit." He offered 208 examples, dating back to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, that, he argued, warranted the labeling of the Soviet system as evil.

Johns has advocated expanded U.S. humanitarian engagement in Africa, claiming that the magnitude of the crises facing that continent warrant U.S. assistance and humanitarian aid. He was an influential critic of Mengistu Haile Mariam's handling of the Ethiopian famine, alleging that the famine, which took over a million Ethiopian lives, was almost entirely a product of Mengistu's government-controlled agricultural policies and the Ethiopian leader's refusal to permit the free flow of foreign assistance. In Windhoek, Namibia for that country's first independent election, Johns also supported expanded economic and political liberalization on the continent. He wrote for the The Wall Street Journal that a stable and democratic Namibia was "critical for the strategic and economic composition of the region."

Following the Cold War's end, Johns helped advance pro-active American engagement in the post-Cold War world, running U.S. government-funded international economic and political development programs in post-Gulf War Kuwait, Turkey and other nations.

In the 1990s, he also was a prominent critic of several components of the Clinton administration's foreign policy. As the United Nations, with support from the Clinton administration, began repatriating Thailand-based Hmong veterans from Vietnam's "Secret War" to Laos, Johns was one of several influential opponents of the policy, labeling the repatriation a "betrayal." Johns' position on the issue drew support, and the U.N. repatriation ultimately was halted. Tens of thousands of Hmong refugees at Wat Tham Krabok and various Thailand refugee camps subsequently were afforded expedited United States immigration rights.

Johns has proven an influential proponent of many of the policies of President George W. Bush, and has defended the Bush administration's military engagement in Iraq. "The Iraq War has become the epicenter in the global war against terrorism, and the outcome in Iraq will ultimately be a key factor in determining whether September 11, 2001 was the beginning of the end for al-Qaeda, or whether, conversely, it was just the beginning of an era of global terror that grows in both scope and duration," Johns wrote in a widely-cited May 4, 2007 essay opposing a timetable for the withdrawal of American forces from Iraq.

Johns also has challenged the allegations of some of Bush's harshest critics that the Bush administration consciously misrepresented U.S. intelligence findings on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Johns has responded that numerous Clinton administration officials, including Vice President Al Gore and National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, cited nearly identical intelligence conclusions regarding Saddam's possession of weapons of mass destruction in justifying Clinton's four-day 1998 bombing of Iraq, known as "Operation Desert Fox." Johns represents that the Clinton administration's nearly identical intelligence findings regarding Saddam's harboring of chemical and biological weapons is evidence that the Bush administration acted in good faith, and probably was technically correct, in alleging that Saddam was in possession of these weapons when the war was launched in 2003.

"It's certainly an extremely reasonable conclusion that Saddam's political maneuvering around United Nations-ordered inspections, which ultimately invited this war, were not designed to hide nothing," Johns argued in May 2007.

Johns also has been one of a handful of prominent U.S. conservatives and other political leaders who, since the September 11, 2001 attacks, have strongly criticized the U.S. news media's decision not to rebroadcast footage of the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center because some viewers purportedly found the footage unsettling. Johns has countered that the U.S. runs the risk of forgetting the magnitude of the September 11 attacks "because some components of our modern culture seem to want us to forget." "We should be unsettled. We need to be unsettled," he wrote.

Johns has been a strong advocate for revisions to current U.S. energy policy, arguing that, while alternative energy sources such as ethanol may hold long-term usefulness in meeting some or all U.S. energy needs, U.S. access to petroleum is essential in the meantime and too little is being done to address this need, especially given vastly increased petroleum consumption in China and India. Johns has supported the relaxation of some U.S. energy regulations, including simplifying federal and state regulations that currently govern gasoline's formulated and unformulated contents, which the petroleum industry has said raises the cost of gasoline's production. Like other conservatives, Johns also has advocated expanding the U.S. oil supply by eliminating several federal and state regulations that currently prohibit petroleum drilling in various U.S. coastal waters and in the oil-rich portion of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, known as ANWR.

Federal government roles
Johns has been a leading national voice while at the conservative Heritage Foundation and has worked closely with leading figures on the American right in support of numerous conservative domestic and foreign policy initiatives. He also has served in several senior U.S. federal governmental capacities. In the U.S. Congress, Johns began his career in the U.S. House of Representatives as a Lyndon Baines Johnson fellow with Congressman Donald L. Ritter (R-PA). He later served in the U.S. Senate as a senior aide to U.S. Senator Olympia Snowe (R-ME).

Johns was a senior aide to New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean prior to Kean's appointment by President George W. Bush as Chairman of the 9/11 Commission. He also was a White House speechwriter to President of the United States George H. W. Bush.

In the George H. W. Bush White House, Johns was one of several senior Bush aides who helped define and advocate some of the policies that have come to be known as "compassionate conservatism," focusing on outreach to low and middle-income Americans and non-traditional Republican constituencies. In a June 2007 interview, he echoed a similar theme, saying: "the American dream is a great concept, but it's just that--a dream--if it doesn't touch people's lives in tangible ways."

In addition to his industry, government and public policy roles, Johns is also one of several prominent U.S.-based conservative blog authors. As of August 2007, his blog ranked highly, among the top 0.5 percent of all blogs on the World Wide Web in terms of total readership, according to the blog index Technorati.

Career

 * Divisional Head and Vice President, Electric Mobility Corporation, Sewell, New Jersey.
 * Vice president, Gentiva Health Services (NASDAQ: GTIV), Long Island, New York.
 * Senior associate, health care practice, S. R. Wojdak & Associates, Philadelphia.
 * Manager, Eli Lilly and Company (NYSE: LLY), Indianapolis, Indiana.
 * Director of research, International Republican Institute, Washington, D.C.
 * White House speechwriter to President of the United States George H. W. Bush.
 * Special assistant to former New Jersey Governor and 9/11 Commission Chairman Thomas Kean.
 * Policy analyst, The Heritage Foundation, Washington, D.C.
 * Assistant editor, Policy Review magazine, Washington, D.C.
 * Author of U.S. and Africa Statistical Handbook (The Heritage Foundation, 1990; second ed., 1991).
 * Contributing author of Finding Our Roots, Facing Our Future: America in the 21st Century (Madison Books, Lanham, Maryland, 1997) ; and Freedom in the World: The Annual Guide of Political Rights and Civil Liberties (Freedom House, New York City, 1993).
 * He has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, National Review, Freedom House's Freedom Review and other publications.
 * National television appearances include PBS's MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour and Nightly Business Report, CNBC, C-SPAN, Fox Morning News and others.
 * Inducted into University of Miami's prestigious Iron Arrow Honor Society, 1984.