Sinsi Hernández-Cancio is the Director of Health Equity at Families USA, where she leads efforts to advance health equity and reduce disparities in health outcomes and health care access and quality. In this role, she has focused on building a movement and advancing policies that leverage health care and delivery system transformation to reduce persistent racial, ethnic, and geographic health inequities with an intersectional lens. Most recently, in 2018, this work has resulted in the founding of the Health Equity Task Force for Delivery and Payment Transformation.
Sinsi is a nationally recognized health equity thought leader and sought after speaker and advisor. Currently, she serves on the Johns Hopkins University Press Health Equity in America National Advisory Council, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s State Strategy Advisory Committee, and the National Center for Complex Health and Social Needs Advisory Committee. She also served on the Addressing Disparities Advisory Panel for the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, and on a Clinical Practice Guideline Sub-Committee of the American Association of Pediatrics.
Sinsi has worked in the field of health policy for more than 15 years and has a longstanding commitment to advancing social justice and fighting for the rights of people of color, especially vulnerable women and children. She started her professional career as a women’s human and civil rights lawyer with a Georgetown Women’s Law and Public Policy Fellowship at the Women’s Rights Project of Human Rights Watch. She first became deeply engaged in health care justice and the elimination of racial and ethnic health inequities as the Health and Human Services advisor for two Puerto Rico Governors at their District of Columbia offices. She then worked on health policy for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), where, during the push to pass the Affordable Care Act, she was the National Campaign Coordinator for SEIU’s Healthcare Equality Project.
Born in Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico, Sinsi is bilingual and bicultural. She earned an A.B. from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and a J.D. from New York University School of Law, where she was a Hays Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Fellow and was awarded the Vanderbilt Medal for her service to the law school for representing and advocating for students of color.