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Elisabeth Benjamin
Vice President of Health InitiativesElisabeth Benjamin is the Vice President of Health Initiatives at the Community Service Society, where she supervises health policy, the Manage Care Consumer Assistance Program (MCCAP), and the Medicaid Choice Education Project (MCEP). MCCAP and MCEP provide consumer assistance, navigational support, health education and outreach to consumers through a network of community-based organizations throughout all five boroughs of New York City. Ms. Benjamin was the author of the feasibility study for MCCAP. She is also a leader of the New York State Health Care for All Campaign (HCFANY), a statewide coalition of more than 80 organizations devoted to securing affordable, quality health care for all New Yorkers (HCFANY blog and website can be viewed at: www.hcfany.org).
Previously, Ms. Benjamin directed the Reproductive Rights Project at the New York Civil Liberties Union and was the founder and Director of the Health Law Unit at the Legal Aid Society. At Legal Aid, Ms. Benjamin litigated significant federal and state cases, including Aliessa v. Novello, which resulted in the restoration of Medicaid eligibility to nearly 150,000 legal immigrant New Yorkers and In the Matter of AB, a Minor Child, which concerned the termination of life support of a child in a persistent vegetative state. She was named a “Health Care Hero” in New York’s Westsider community newspaper.
Ms. Benjamin has worked in community health and hospital projects in India, the Philippines, Morocco, and Tunisia. In 1991, she coordinated two public health and legal missions to post-war Iraq which documented the nature and extent of civilian casualties due to the Gulf War. That work was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. In 2003, Ms. Benjamin returned to Iraq to work on a humanitarian assessment, which was published in The Lancet.
Ms. Benjamin received a degree in Health Policy and Management from Harvard School of Public Health in 1988 and a law degree from Columbia University School of Law in 1992. She clerked for the Honorable Robert Sweet, U.S. District Court Judge for the Southern District of New York. In 2003-2004, she was a Visiting Scholar in Bioethics in a program jointly run by Montefiore Medical Center, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and New York University.