Health Management Associates

Health Management Associates

Health Management Associates was founded in 1985 by a group of former Michigan public health officials who saw demand for independent Medicaid and safety-net policy expertise outside government. The firm structured itself as a private, employee-owned consultancy. It has since scaled to work with state governments, county health systems, hospital associations, and philanthropies across all 50 US states, with a practice that spans Medicaid policy, behavioral health, long-term care, and public health data systems. HMA's business is fee-for-service government consulting — not asset management. Its revenue derives from multi-year technical assistance contracts with state Medicaid agencies, analyses for hospital trade groups, and program evaluations for foundations such as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and California Health Care Foundation (public record). The firm fields teams of former state Medicaid directors, health economists, actuaries, and data analysts rather than investment professionals. It does not make direct investments, co-investments, or fund commitments of any kind. The firm employs roughly 300 professionals across a distributed US footprint, with substantive practice hubs in Lansing, Chicago, New York, and Sacramento (public record). It has grown through lateral hires of senior former government officials. In October 2024, HMA acquired Leavitt Partners, a health policy consultancy led by former HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt (per the firm's official communications, 2024). HMA's structural differentiator is employment of roughly two dozen former state Medicaid directors — a concentration of operational public-sector experience that no law firm, investment bank, or traditional strategy consultancy matches (public record). The firm operates outside the financial services ecosystem entirely. For institutional allocators, HMA's profile functions as a diligence resource on Medicaid policy rather than an investment counterparty — its analysts appear at every major state waiver hearing and Medicaid managed-care procurement, and its modeling shapes how billions in public funds flow to private managed-care organizations.