U.S. Healthcare founder and major Penn donor dies at 87

Leonard Abramson, the Philadelphia-born founder of U.S. Healthcare and one of Penn Medicine’s largest benefactors, died July 4 at 93. He built one of the first health maintenance organizations into a major managed-care company, then used the fortune from its sale to finance cancer research and clinical care in Philadelphia.

Abramson’s rise began in Strawberry Mansion, where he was born before working as a taxi driver to help pay for a pharmacy degree from the University of the Sciences. He later earned a master’s in public administration from Pennsylvania State University. In 1975, he launched U.S. Healthcare, and in 1996 he sold it to Aetna for $8.3 billion. Abramson had accurately predicted the need for prepaid medical plans in the 1960s and 1970s.

In 1997, Leonard and Madlyn Abramson announced a $100 million gift to establish the Leonard and Madlyn Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute, which Penn at the time identified as the largest single gift for cancer research to an NCI-designated comprehensive cancer center. Penn renamed its cancer center the Abramson Cancer Center in 2002. By 2010, the Abramson family’s support for Penn Medicine had grown to more than $140 million, including a $25.5 million gift that helped fund basic science and translational cancer research.

The family’s gifts supported research programs, endowed professorships and patient-care services. Work there helped advance CAR T-cell therapy through Penn investigator Carl June and the collaboration between Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Novartis.

Penn Medicine wrote: “dedicated philanthropist, visionary businessman, and true friend.” Jonathan A. Epstein, the dean of the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, said Abramson’s legacy was tied to hope at the Abramson Cancer Center. He was predeceased by his wife, Madlyn Abramson, and is survived by their daughters, Marcy Shoemaker, Nancy Wolfson and Judith Felgoise.