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Sally C. Pipes

President, CEO, and Thomas W. Smith Fellow in Health Care Policy, Pacific Research Institute

Sally C. Pipes is president and chief executive officer of the Pacific Research Institute, a San Francisco-based think tank founded in 1979. Prior to becoming president of PRI in 1991, she was assistant director of the Fraser Institute, based in Vancouver, Canada.

Ms. Pipes addresses national and international audiences on health care. She is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow in Health Care Policy. She has been interviewed on ABC’s 20/20; CNN; FOX News”; NBC “Nightly News with Brian Williams”; FOX Business Network; “The O’Reilly Factor,” FOX News’ “Your World With Neil Cavuto,” “The Today Show;” “Kudlow & Company on CNBC; MSNBC; “Dateline;” “Politically Incorrect;” “The Dennis Miller Show;” NBC Bay Area’s “Reality Check on Obamacare with Sam Brock”, and other prominent programs. She was featured in the special one-hour FOX documentary, “Live Free or Die in New Hampshire,” that was hosted by Bret Baier and released on August 8, 2014. The special which aired on three consecutive evenings focused on the importance of innovation in the pharmaceutical and medical device industries. On the first night, the documentary was viewed by 1.3 million people.

Ms. Pipes writes a bi-weekly health care column “Piping Up” for Forbes.com. She has written regular columns for the Examiner newspapers, Chief Executive, and Investor’s Business Daily. Her health care opinion pieces have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, USA Today, Financial Times of London, The Hill, RealClearPolitics, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Sacramento Bee, U.S. News and World Report, the Boston Globe, and the San Diego Union-Tribune, to name a few. Ms. Pipes’ views on health care also appeared in a special report of the world’s 30 leading health care experts published by Forbes.com entitled, “Solutions: Health Care and in Steve Forbes’ latest book How Capitalism Can Save Us. She was widely quoted in Shape Magazine and in the New York Times Sunday Magazine in an article by Princeton’s Peter Singer on how Obama will ration your care.

As a health care expert, Ms. Pipes participates in many debates. She and Avik Roy from the Manhattan Institute debated Jonathan Cohn, senior editor, New Republic Magazine and Jonathan Chait, editor, New York Magazine, on September 10 at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia. The resolution “The Affordable Care Act is Bad for America” aired on PBS Worldwide (360 stations) in October 2014. She also has debated Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, former Princeton economics professor and New York Times columnist, in New York at Rockefeller University. Sponsored by Intelligence Squared, the debate was attended by 450 people and was viewed by 270 million around the world through NPR and BBC Worldwide. She has also debated Princeton Professor Uwe Reinhardt and Harvard’s Dr. David Himmelstein twice on the “No” side of the motion that “universal health coverage is the responsibility of the federal government.” Prior to the 2012 presidential election, she debated former Vermont Governor Howard Dean on CNBC.

She served as one of Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s four health care advisors in his bid for the Republican nomination for president in 2008. She was featured in Michael Moore’s movie “Sicko” and has participated in prominent public forums, testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and the House Oversight Committee, the Senate HELP Committee, and the California, Maine, and Oregon legislatures. She also participates in key radio shows nationwide including “The Dennis Prager Show”, The Jerry Doyle Show, and “The Lou Dobbs Show”. To date in 2015 she had 140 health care op-eds published with many being reprinted and retweeted.

The Truth About ObamaCare was published by Regnery Publishing and released August 2010. To date over 12,000 copies have been sold. Following Tom Sowell’s review in his nationally-syndicated column, The Truth About ObamaCare rose to #38 in sales on Amazon.com. He wrote “Fortunately-in fact, very fortunately-you don’t have to slog through 2,400 pages of legislative jargon or turn to a fortune teller to divine the future. The Truth About ObamaCare by Sally Pipes lays it out in the plainest English.”

The Pipes Plan: The Top Ten Ways to Dismantle and Replace Obamacare was released by Regnery in January 2012. Dr. Arthur Laffer wrote the foreword and endorsements were provided by Steve Forbes, former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, and Dr. Hal Scherz, head of Docs4Patientcare.

The Cure for Obamacare was released July 17^th, 2013 (Encounter Books, Broadside). On January 14, 2014, Eagle Publishing’s Human Events division released her latest white paper The True Costs of Obamacare, 2014–a special report. In January 2016, Encounter Books will release her latest book The Way Out of Obamacare.

Her first book, Miracle Cure: How to Solve America’s Health Care Crisis and Why Canada Isn’t the Answer with a foreword by Milton Friedman was released September 28, 2004. It is available on Amazon.com. In October 2008, her second book The Top Ten Myths of American Health Care: A Citizen’s Guide with a foreword by Steve Forbes, was published. The release was well timed with the national debate on health care reform. It has been widely reviewed and quoted. Over 1.2 million copies have been downloaded from PRI’s website and 4,500 copies have been sold. Thomas Sowell, also in his syndicated column wrote of the book “Before you do anything else, make a note to read The Top Ten Myths of American Health Care. It might literally save your life.”

Ms. Pipes served on the Medical Advisory Council of Genworth Financial’s Long-Term Care Insurance Division in 2006, and currently serves on the national advisory board of Capital Research Center, the Advisory Board of the California Association of Scholars, and the State Policy Network president’s advisory council, and The Heartland Institute’s Board of Policy Advisors. She has served as a trustee of St. Luke’s Hospital Foundation in San Francisco, a board member of the Independent Women’s Forum, and as a governor of the Donner Canadian Foundation. She was a member of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s transition team in 2003-04. She serves as chairman of the board of the Benjamin Rush Institute. She is a member, Board of Advisors, Council for Affordable Health Coverage (CAHC).

She received the Roe Award at the 2004 annual meeting of State Policy Network. The award is a tribute to an individual in the state public policy movement who has a passion for liberty, a willingness to work for it, and noteworthy achievement in turning dreams into realities. In 2005, Human Events named her one of the Top 10 Women in the Conservative Movement in America. In 2008, she was honored by the California Women’s Leadership Association. She received the 3^rd Annual Women Achievers’ award, “Celebrating the Spirit of Women”. She was also featured in a new book “Women Who Paved the Way” as one of 35 most outstanding women in business in the nation. In August 2009, she was invited by Canada’s Minister of Finance to participate in his “Third Annual Summer Policy Retreat” at Meech Lake in Quebec. The three-day event was attended by a small group of professors, think tank presidents, and small business leaders. The focus was on how to restructure the Canadian health care system.

She was the founder in 2008 of the Benjamin Rush Institute (BRI) and now serves as Chairman of the Board. BRI is a Federalist Society-type organization for medical students across America. There are 20 chapters at medical schools from Harvard to Duke.

Ms. Pipes, a former Canadian, became an American citizen in 2006. Married to Professor Charles Kesler, she is a member of the Mont Pelerin Society. While in Canada she was a member of the Canadian Association for Business Economics (president for two terms).