Our Team

Thomas Barker

Thomas Barker is a Senior Advisor at Leavitt Partners. Barker is among the Nation’s foremost experts on Medicare and health care legal issues. He brings with him decades of health policy and legislative experience. Barker recently left the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services where he served as acting General Counsel for the Department. Presently, Barker is a Partner in Boston-based law firm Foley Hoag. Barker splits his time between the firm’s Washington, DC and Boston offices and focuses his practice on complex federal legal and regulatory health care policy matters and general rule makings.

Until January 2009, Barker served in a succession of high-level federal health care policy positions throughout the Bush Administration and most recently served as acting General Counsel and policy advisor under U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt. While serving as acting General Counsel, Barker oversaw a staff of some 450 attorneys responsible for reviewing every regulation and interpretive guidance published by the Department. He was also in charge of interpreting proposed and enacted health care legislation in Congress, and providing legal advice to Secretary Leavitt, along with the Administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Service and Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.

During his time at HHS, Barker played a key role in the implementation of several major health policy initiatives: the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit; Medicaid modernization; the President’s agenda on health care transparency and health information technology; and the President’s health care access proposals. He also chaired HHS briefings on Medicare and Medicaid policy, and assisted in the initiative to rebuild the New Orleans health care infrastructure following Hurricane Katrina.

Barker was on hand for multiple milestones in federal health care policy in recent years. He helped enact Medicare part D in 2003; served as the administration’s lead negotiator with Congress on Medicare and Katrina relief provisions in the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005; helped draft President Bush’s Executive Order on health care transparency; served as HHS negotiator on the pharmaceutical and medical device provisions of the U.S.-South Korean Free Trade Agreement; developed health care initiatives for the President’s State of the Union Addresses in 2007 and 2008; was principal liaison between HHS and the Department of Treasury on tax issues for health care; and served as collaborator in the Health Care Forum as part of the Strategic Economic Dialogue with the Chinese government.

From 1981-1992, Mr. Barker served on Capitol Hill as a legislative aide to the ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee and the ranking member of the House Committee on Ways and Means’ Subcommittee on Health.

Mr. Barker is also an assistant professor of health law at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.  He teaches courses in Medicare and Medicaid law; pharmaceutical law and policy; and introductory health law.

As a member of the Boston Bar Association and the American Health Lawyers Association, Mr. Barker is a frequent lecturer and author on health care legal matters.  He is a magna cum laude graduate of Suffolk University School of Law in Boston and received a Bachelor of Arts degree with honors in English and Political Science from Jacksonville University in Jacksonville, Florida. He currently lives in Washington, D.C.