J. Patrick Rooney

John Patrick Rooney (December 13, 1927 – September 15, 2008) was the chairman and founder of the Fairness Foundation which spends its energies in helping low income Americans on education and health care. He is the Father of Medical Savings Accounts, now known as Health Savings Accounts. He had been the chairman of Golden Rule Insurance Company, during which he built the company to one of the nation’s leaders in the individual health insurance market. According to Indiana Business Magazine, "in the insurance industry, a description that often precedes Rooney's name is 'maverick'.

In 1976, Rooney led a fight against discrimination in insurance agent testing with an eight-year lawsuit against the State of Illinois and the Educational Testing Service and was successful. The suit charged discrimination against minority applicants. Estimated cost of the litigation and experts was approximately $2 million. The civil rights case was settled with a precedent-setting agreement that requires a method of constructing exams designed to eliminate unnecessary racial disparities.

An advocate of social change, Rooney’s approach to parental choice in education broke into national headlines in 1991. with his founding of the Educational Choice Charitable Trust. The Educational Choice Charitable Trust provides tuition assistance for center-city students from lower-income families in Indianapolis whose parents want them to attend a non-government school of the parents’ choice. Rooney’s action in Indianapolis started a ripple effect across the country. There are over 60 such programs with over 53,000 students in privately funded educational choice programs, based upon Rooney’s original model.

Rooney received attention in the fall of 2006 United States Congressional elections, after America's PAC, a group Rooney to which donated $900,000, ran controversial ads alleging that Democrats "supported liberal abortion laws" and that 400,000 abortions each year were of black babies. Of the 27 radio ads that ran during the 2006 election cycle, only two dealt with the abortion issue. The ads can be heard, and the scripts read, at Vote Our Values. The spokesman for the group is Herman Cain, an African American radio talk show host, author, and candidate, for the Republican Party nomination in the 2012 presidential election.

...
Wikipedia