Topic: 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 previously was the chairman of Golden Rule Insurance Co., 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, Mr. 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 construction exams designed to eliminate unnecessary racial disparities.

After the settlement with the ETS, Rooney donated more than $500,000 to John Weiss, Chuck Stone, former Director of Minority Affairs at ETS and Bob Schaeffer to help create FairTest: The National Center for Fair & Open Testing in 1984. Today FairTest, based in Boston, works to elimiante the overuse and misuse of standardized tests in the K-12, university admissions and employment licensing arenas.