Lay Leadership

Howard Gleckman, President

Howard Gleckman is a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, where he is affiliated with the Tax Policy Center and the Retirement Policy Program. He speaks and writes frequently on aging and caregiving. He is the author of Caring for Our Parents: Inspiring Stories of Families Seeking New Solutions to America’s Most Urgent Health Care Crisis, as well as two regular columns that can be read on Forbes.com. In 2016, he was named one of the nation’s top 50 Influencers in Aging by Next Avenue.

Gleckman became interested in aging issues when he and his wife helped care for their parents:

It was the toughest thing I ever did, but also the most rewarding.

Before joining the Urban Institute, Gleckman was a senior correspondent in the Washington bureau of Business Week, where he covered health and elder care, as well as tax and budget issues, for nearly 20 years. He was a 2003 National Magazine Award finalist for a story called The Coming Revolution in Health Care.

Gleckman also was a Media Fellow at the Kaiser Family Foundation and a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

He is a member of the Johns Hopkins Health System’s National Capital Region Executive Governance Committee and a trustee of the Johns Hopkins Medicine Patient Safety and Quality Committee. He is the former chair of the board of trustees of Suburban Hospital (Bethesda MD) and former president of Tifereth Israel Congregation (Washington, DC).

He lives in Kensington, Md. with his wife, Ann Kline, a retired hospice chaplain.