Shannon M. McMahon, MPA joined Kaiser Permanente (KP) in August 2017 as the executive director of Medicaid policy. In this role, she leads KP Governmental Relations’ national public, regulatory and legislative policy development on Medicaid across KP’s eight regions that serve over one million Medicaid members. Ms. McMahon joined KP after a twenty-year career leading state publicly financed health care programs.
In February 2015, Ms. McMahon was appointed Deputy Secretary of Health Care Financing at the Maryland Department of Health. In this role, she served as Maryland’s Medicaid Director. As the chief executive of the Medicaid program, she implemented several initiatives to improve and expand coverage for over 1.3 million members.
Previously, Ms. McMahon was the Director of Coverage and Access at the Center for Health Care Strategies (CHCS) where she led Medicaid eligibility, benefit design and purchasing implementation efforts and learning collaboratives for states and the federal government during the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. She is published about the role Medicaid has assumed in the coverage continuum, and the importance of benefit design for high need, high cost patients.
Prior to CHCS, she worked in executive and management-level roles in Minnesota Medicaid, most recently as the Chief Administrative Officer, where she oversaw finance and operations for Minnesota’s three public health care programs. Ms. McMahon also spent several years working on health policy issues as a non-partisan analyst at the Maryland Department of Legislative Services in Annapolis and held the position of senior budget and policy adviser to the Secretary and Principal Deputy Secretary of Maryland’s Department of Health.
Ms. McMahon has a bachelor’s degree in justice from American University and a master’s degree in public administration from Northeastern University, where she was the recipient of a full tuition public policy fellowship.
Ms. McMahon serves on the board of directors for several national non-profit organizations including the Association of Behavioral Health and Wellness, Maryland Health Care for the Homeless, where she is the Chair of its Public Policy and Engagement Committee and the National Academy for State Health Policy’s Center for Health Policy Development (CHPD). She also serves as Chair of America’s Health Insurance Plans’ Medicaid Policy Committee and is a charter member of the American Council of Political Leaders (ACYPL). She was competitively selected as a delegate of ACYPL’s six member bilateral cultural and political exchange delegation to Vietnam and Thailand in 2012 and lead ACYPL’s 2017 delegation to the People’s Republic of China. She is a past member of the board of directors of the National Association of Medicaid Directors.