James R. Tallon Jr., a health care policy expert who as a New York State legislator spurred efforts to expand coverage for the poor, particularly children, died on July 9 in Endicott, N.Y. He was 82.
His son Michael said he died, in a hospice not far from his hometown, Binghamton, from idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a scarring or inflammation of the lungs that is more common in smokers, although Mr. Tallon never smoked.
As chairman of the Assembly Health Committee from 1979 to 1987 and leader of the chamber’s Democratic majority from 1987 to 1993, Mr. Tallon was instrumental in striking bipartisan compromises that expanded Medicaid coverage for low-income New Yorkers, especially for children and for prenatal care; codified patient rights; curbed malpractice insurance rates; and subsidized AIDS research.
After 19 years in the Legislature, he served from 1993 to 2017 as president of the United Hospital Fund, a charitable foundation and research group that supports nonprofit hospitals. From 2007 to 2014, he was chairman of the Commonwealth Fund, which conducts research on health care issues.
Some of the policies he initiated in New York, in collaboration with Democratic as well as Republican governors and with a hearty assist from the hospital workers union, were embraced in Washington. Among them was the joint federal-state Children’s Health Insurance Program, which was modeled on Child Health Plus, New York’s program for subsidized health insurance for children, which was enacted in 1990.
Mr. Tallon accepted the United Hospital Fund presidency after turning down an offer from the Clinton administration to lead the Health Care Financing Administration, the division of the Department of Health and Human Services that regulates Medicare and Medicaid.
He later led the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured and was a member of the New York State Board of Regents until 2017.
Dennis Rivera, a former president of Local 1199 of the hospital workers union, praised Mr. Tallon for his “immense knowledge and the respect he enjoyed from his fellow legislators,” and for being “genuinely concerned about quality health care for all New Yorkers and Americans.”
James Raymond Tallon Jr. was born on Oct. 21, 1941, in Brooklyn, the son of James Raymond Tallon, a postal clerk, and Mary (Colbert) Tallon.
The family moved to Binghamton shortly after Jim was born. After graduating in 1963 with a bachelor’s degree in political science from Syracuse University, where he enrolled in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, he served with Army intelligence in Berlin. (He later received a master’s degree in international relations from Boston University.)
He married Norma A. Parker, whom he had known since high school, in 1963. In addition to his son Michael, she survives him, as do two other sons, James and Edward, and five grandchildren.
The family returned to the Binghamton area from Berlin in 1968 and, after running unsuccessfully for the Assembly in 1970, Mr. Tallon became president of the NY-Penn Health Planning Council, a health care agency for a six-county area straddling the New York-Pennsylvania border. He succeeded in his second race for the Assembly in 1974.
Mr. Tallon’s work on the planning council, his son Michael said, “exposed him to the difficulties faced by many in our community when attempting to access affordable, quality health care.” He was inspired, Michael Tallon said, by John F. Kennedy and by Gene Roddenberry, the creator of “Star Trek,” who was publicly committed to a social justice agenda.
“In time,” Michael Tallon added, “the policy-planning complexity and the moral charge of ensuring health care was accessible to all became both his professional calling and his passion.”