The Utah entrepreneur driving President Donald Trump’s overhaul of the U.S. health care system only agreed to take command over one-third of the federal budget because of a field trip with his four kids.
Chris Klomp, the newly named chief counselor of the Department of Health and Human Services, was picking apples with his wife and children on a Sunday afternoon in September when he first heard from Trump’s transition team.
It was Day 4 of a 30-day homeschool adventure through American history, with scheduled visits to Jamestown, Plymouth and the sites of the Revolution as a reward for finishing their constitutional studies the year before.
They wanted their kids to understand that democracy is a fragile thing because it depends on the sacrifice of everyday citizens, Klomp said.
Klomp told his children he hoped if they ever got the call to serve, they would answer.
Then the call came for him.
“If this call had come in at any other time, I’m not sure I would have answered it,” Klomp told the Deseret News. When Klomp realized there was no better way to live what he taught, it became clear what he had to do. “And so I called back.”
Over the previous decade as CEO of Utah-based Collective Medical, Klomp had cultivated a reputation in the Beehive State, and beyond, for balancing his emphatically frugal management style with an encouragingly steadfast focus on people.
Following the 2024 election, Klomp was put in charge of the nation’s largest health care program, Medicare. There he spearheaded reforms to make Medicare payments site neutral, to simplify hospital billing and to increase price transparency.
In a statement to the Deseret News, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz described Klomp as “a generational talent” whose ability to “organize, optimize, and inspire” had already had an “extraordinary” impact.
After serving as the architect for Trump’s landmark deal to reduce drug prices, Klomp was tapped in February to oversee all HHS operations — and to make Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s slogan “make America healthy again” a reality.
Less than 18 months after answering the call, Klomp is now responsible for administering $2.6 trillion in taxpayer funds. His task is to “unleash the talent” of 70,000 employees by “refocusing their mission on public health,” Kennedy said in a statement.
“HHS is the largest agency in human history,” Kennedy told the Deseret News. “Klomp’s astonishing administrative and organizational talent makes him the perfect leader to unravel the culture of corruption, (and) end fraud, waste, and abuse.”
Building on his background of hospital software development, Klomp is expected to further the administration’s emphasis on affordability by making the massive department, which now reports directly to him, more efficient and accessible.
The strategy of using high tech to cut government spending contains echoes of Elon Musk’s short-lived Department of Government Efficiency. But what Klomp is proposing has less to do with cuts than improved services — DOGE without the drama.
Amid dueling partisan narratives about the administration’s health care reforms, Klomp stands out for backing Trump’s bold rethinking of the status quo while simultaneously praising the civil servants he admits probably didn’t vote for the president.
“We live in a deeply polarized country,” Klomp said. “Sometimes we take issues and we make them left or right, red or blue, when actually we can all find common ground. And health care is at the epicenter of that. It is not a red-blue, left-right issue.”
Klomp’s potential to be a unifying figure in the administration is unsurprising to former colleagues from across the political spectrum. His brand of empathetic innovation, they say, left a mark on the West long before he was called to Washington, D.C.
A mission to reform health care
Klomp knew from a young age he wanted to transform health care.
He was born in northern Florida while his father completed a medical residency specializing in obstetrics and gynecology. The family moved to Boise, Idaho, when Klomp was a toddler. He can’t remember a time when he didn’t want to follow in his dad’s footsteps.
“I wanted to be just like him,” Klomp said. “He was old school. He believed that being a healer was the highest calling.”
In his father, who delivered thousands of babies over a 45-year career, Klomp found his model for health care at its finest. In his mother, who died when Klomp was 13 from a cancer linked to experimental arthritis treatment, Klomp found his motivation to improve it.
Klomp graduated from Boise High School and started pre-med courses at Brigham Young University with “a chip on (his) shoulder” toward the health care system, he admits. He wanted to make a difference as a physician. But a church mission expanded his scope.
Representing The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Romania and Moldova for two years, Klomp had the opportunity to work with Elder D. Lee Tobler, then the president of the Europe Central area, and formerly the chief financial officer of BF Goodrich.
Tobler told Elder Klomp that if he wanted to make reforms at a larger scale, he would need to learn how to manage organizations. Klomp was sold. He switched his major to economics and upon graduation started his career at Bain & Company as a business consultant.
After a decade observing business management, and investing in new startups at Bain Capital, Klomp was ready to go on another mission, to renovate the U.S. health care system. His big break came from an unlikely source while he was at Stanford business school.
An emergency department social worker noticed some patients were making frequent visits to the ER for opiate painkillers. These individuals, often suffering from underlying disorders, jumped from hospital to hospital, exploiting the siloed nature of patient data.
To solve the collective action problem of hospital interoperability, Klomp and two childhood friends created Collective Medical, with its Emergency Department Information Exchange to alert partnered providers when they were treating high-risk patients.
In its first year, Collective Medical bailed Washington out of a massive Medicaid deficit. By connecting emergency departments across the state, Collective Medical enabled doctors to reduce unnecessary prescriptions by 24% and saved $33 million.
Within five years, Collective Medical had partnered with half of the hospitals in the country. In 2020, Collective Medical was sold for $650 million. This rapid success belies Klomp’s true strength of putting people above profits, according to Anne Zink.
As the chief medical officer of Alaska, Zink had lost count of the organizations that refused to operate in her state. It was too rural and too far away. But Zink learned Klomp’s No. 1 priority wasn’t revenue; it was helping physicians more effectively heal patients.
“Chris never said, ‘Don’t go to Alaska and help them because it’s cold, hard, expensive, and not a lot of patients,’” said Zink, who is a practicing ER physician in Palmer, Alaska. “That didn’t make him not do it. And I won’t ever forget that.”
This is just one of many times when Klomp surprised clients — and co-workers — with his ability to streamline a successful business while keeping it aligned with his “social mission,” according to Ben Zaniello, the former chief medical officer at Collective Medical.
Convincing hospitals to give away what they saw as their competitive information advantage required a lot of trust, Zaniello said, which Klomp gained by flying in the next day to meet with prospective clients and responding to complaints in the middle of the night.
Klomp also gained the trust of his staff, Zaniello said. Whether it was through modeling frugality by flying Frontier and sharing rooms at the cheapest hotel; or helping one-by-one, like by missing a speaking engagement to talk with an employee going through a divorce.
Zaniello acknowledged he and Klomp are on “different political spectrums.” And Zink expressed disappointment in the administration’s approach to public health so far. But both said Klomp’s background at Collective Medical proves he can transform HHS for the better.
“He is ultimately there to reduce costs,” Zaniello said. “Chris is the right guy to do it because he won’t lose the ‘why.’”
Who is Trump’s ‘favorite Mormon’?
Klomp first caught the attention of the Trump administration during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. White House senior adviser Jared Kushner reached out to Collective Medical to create a real-time dataset highlighting hospital hot spots.
At that point, Collective Medical likely had the largest care collaboration network in the country, according to Klomp. The company claimed to do this work at no cost to the government and also volunteered to help enable data sharing for the Department of Veterans Affairs.
“The role of government sometimes is to be an arbiter of finding alignment between different stakeholders who maybe don’t know that they actually have alignment,” Klomp said. “And sometimes it’s to remind good people how to make good decisions and step up and do the right thing.”
This is how Klomp describes his role as one of the lead negotiators who persuaded some of the leading pharmaceutical manufacturers in the world, including Pfizer, to voluntarily lower dozens of U.S. drug prices by 50-90% to a “Most Favored Nation” price range.
Klomp outlined the deal at a Sept. 30 Oval Office announcement standing beside Trump. Klomp thanked Pfizer for acting against market incentives and praised Trump for enabling what he said were “the most significant ... price reductions in the history of our country.”
The comments seemed to have impressed the president.
Trump has referred to Klomp as his “favorite Mormon,” or “the killer Mormon,” and asked during a meeting last year, “‘Where’s my Mormon?’” The Washington Post reported. In response to the nicknames, Klomp told the Deseret News, “I haven’t heard all of those.”
In his current role, Klomp still oversees the $1.1 trillion Medicare program that provides health care to 68 million elderly and disabled individuals. In January, CMS caused alarm at some hospitals by not increasing the reimbursement rate for privately managed Medicare plans.
Utah Hospital Association President Francis Gibson told the Deseret News this could slam rural Utah hospitals that already work beneath their margins. But Gibson said he is optimistic about HHS being managed by someone who knows Utah, and the private sector, so well.
Health care has figured prominently into Trump’s second term, with Medicaid work requirements and rural hospital funds standing out as key provisions of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and with drug negotiations dropping the price of insulin, infertility treatments and weight loss drugs.
The priorities Klomp is pushing for are found in “The Great Healthcare Plan,” he said, which include ending “extra” subsidies for insurance companies, asking companies to clearly explain their coverage and requiring providers to prominently display their pricing.
Intermountain Health CEO Rob Allen told the Deseret News in a statement that Klomp “regularly requests and actively listens to feedback from the healthcare industry.” Klomp’s focus on payment reform and data sharing stand to do the most to improve programs like Medicare, Allen said.
American health care is notoriously complex, but Klomp has proven capable of reforming it, Sky Zone CEO Case Lawrence said. Lawrence helped to select Klomp as Utah’s “Entrepreneur Of The Year” in 2018 precisely because of the “degree of difficulty” of his endeavor.
“The whole purpose of Collective Medical was to make our health care system work more efficiently and to eliminate waste,” Lawrence told the Deseret News. “No one has been prepared to understand the difficulties and obstacles to really making progress on that problem like Chris has.”
Klomp’s background also positions him to promote bipartisan solutions, since most people agree on policies that make health care more affordable, higher quality and empower patients with information, said Henry Eyring, who researches health care costs at Duke University.
Klomp sees his job as uniting the most well-funded organization in U.S. government behind a vision of making health care more affordable and reorienting that care toward underlying needs, not just the surface-level symptoms that fill ERs, he told told the Deseret News.
A year-and-a-half ago, Klomp planned to fulfill this mission by advising companies specializing in infertility, just like his father did, and spending more time with his family at home in Park City. Instead, he was called to manage the system he had spent his life thinking about how to reform.
“I think Heavenly Father often knows what we need and what we want, and we often don’t,” Klomp said.