Elizabeth Helen McCaughey (; born October 20, 1948), formerly known as Betsy McCaughey Ross, is an American politician who was the lieutenant governor of New York from 1995 to 1998 under Governor George Pataki. She unsuccessfully sought the Democratic Party nomination for governor after Pataki dropped her from his 1998 ticket, and she ended up on the ballot under the Liberal Party line. In August 2016, Donald Trump's presidential campaign announced that she had joined the campaign as an economic adviser. She was an unsuccessful candidate for governor of Connecticut in 2026.
McCaughey has been a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute and Hudson Institute thinktanks and has written numerous articles and op-eds. She was a member of the boards of directors of medical equipment companies Genta (from 2001 to 2007) and Cantel Medical Corporation, but she resigned in 2009 to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest with her public advocacy against the Affordable Care Act.
Early life, education, and family McCaughey and her twin brother, William, were born in Pittsburgh to Ramona Peterken, and her husband Albert, a factory janitor. The family moved around the Northeastern United States for six years before it settled down in Westport, Connecticut, where McCaughey's father did maintenance and later engineering work at a nail clipper factory. McCaughey recalled her parents' difficulty in affording medical treatment: "my brother was a serious asthmatic as a child. I remember my parents sitting at the kitchen table wondering if they could afford to take [him] to the hospital."
McCaughey attended public schools in Westport through the 10th grade. After receiving a scholarship, she transferred to a private Massachusetts boarding school, the Mary A. Burnham School, for her last two years of high school, rarely visiting home, then or during her college years.
She received a scholarship to attend Vassar College, where she majored in history. She wrote her senior thesis on Karl Marx and Alexis de Tocqueville and received her AB in 1970. McCaughey went on to graduate school at Columbia University in New York City, earning her MA in 1972 and her PhD in constitutional history in 1976.
She won Columbia's Bancroft Dissertation Award in American History in 1976 and her dissertation was published by Columbia University Press in 1980, From Loyalist to Founding Father: The Political Odyssey of William Samuel Johnson.
She also contributed a chapter about Johnson to the 1979 book The American Revolution: Changing Perspectives by William M. Fowler and Wallace Coyle.
McCaughey's father died in 1970 at the age of 60. Her mother, an alcoholic, died the next year of liver disease at the age of 42. In 1972, she married Thomas K. McCaughey, a Yale College graduate she had met in college. He was then moving up as an investment banker. The McCaugheys separated in 1992 and divorced in 1994, with McCaughey and her ex-spouse sharing joint custody of their three daughters. In January 1993, she filed an affidavit in her divorce proceeding in which she said she had no annual earnings from employment during most of the 18 years of her marriage to Thomas, and she had never earned more than $20,000 per year except in 1990, when she "sold an idea to Fox television for a windfall once-in-a-lifetime sum of $75,000".
She married wealthy investment banker Wilbur Ross Jr. in December 1995. He filed for divorce in November 1998.
Academic work, 1977–1988 McCaughey taught history as a visiting assistant professor at Vassar College in 1977–1978 and was a lecturer in 1979–1980. She was an assistant professor between 1981 and 1983, teaching two classes per year, both at Columbia University Between 1983 and 1984, she had a National Endowment for the Humanities postdoctoral fellowship. From 1986 to 1988, she served as a guest curator at the New-York Historical Society and was responsible for the museum's exhibit commemorating the bicentennial of the US Constitution. She also authored a book, Government by Choice: Inventing the United States Constitution, which cataloged the exhibit.
Policy positions and scholarship, 1989–1993 In the late 1980s, McCaughey briefly considered a career in TV news, but she opted instead for a position as a senior scholar at the Center for the Study of the Presidency, serving from 1989 to 1992. There, she wrote an article, book reviews, and a guest editorial for its journal, Presidential Studies Quarterly (PSQ), and an op-ed in USA Today advocating reform of the Electoral College method of electing the president. She testified at a July 22, 1992, hearing before the United States Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and helped produce a report suggesting constitutional amendments to fix perceived flaws in the Electoral College.
McCaughey also wrote op-ed columns that appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and USA Today in which she opposed plans involving local and state redistricting to comply with the Voting Rights Act, and she criticized federal court-ordered desegregation of schools in Connecticut and New Jersey. She also supported the nomination of a federal judge, Clarence Thomas to the United States Supreme Court by arguing that he would judge cases there on their merits and not tend to interpret cases in a manner consistent with his conservative beliefs; She also supported a tobacco company in litigation before the Supreme Court and praised the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey Supreme Court decision, restricting abortion rights.
In February 1993, the John M. Olin Foundation funded a fellowship at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, for McCaughey to write a book on race and the legal system to be titled Beyond Pluralism: Overcoming the Narcissism of Minor Differences. McCaughey wrote op-eds over the next six months in The Wall Street Journal and USA Today in which she supported the 1993 selection of a jury from predominately-white, Republican, rural counties for the urban (Memphis)-located retrial of African American and Democratic US Representative Harold Ford, Sr., and praised the 1993 Shaw v. Reno Supreme Court decision, favoring five white voters who said their rights had been infringed upon by redistricting that had been done to comply with the Voting Rights Act.
Healthcare reform, 1993–1994 On September 22, 1993, US President Bill Clinton delivered a nationally televised speech about his healthcare reform plan to a joint session of Congress. From September 28 to 30, 1993, First Lady Hillary Clinton, the architect of the universal health care plan, testified about its details before five US congressional committees. The cost of providing insurance for the estimated 37 million people then uninsured was to be covered in part by new taxes on tobacco. On the last day of Hillary Clinton's testimony, The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by McCaughey, who wrote that the 239-page draft legislation differed markedly from the White House's public statements and would have "devastating consequences". Citing words and phrases from the draft, she argued that the 77 percent of Americans then covered by insurance would see a downgrade in their policies, and most would not be able to keep their own physicians but be forced into price-controlled health maintenance organizations (HMOs), which would provide only the most basic care. According to McCaughey, the HMO plans would not pay for visits to specialists or for second opinions, and most physicians would be driven out of private practice.
In late November 1993, the bill for the Clinton health care plan of 1993 was introduced in the Congress and made publicly available. The Wall Street Journal then published an op-ed by McCaughey in which said she had pored over the entire bill and concluded that it had price controls that would cause rationing, and the bill was dangerous.
McCaughey expanded her op-eds into a five-page article titled "No Exit", which appeared as the cover story in The New Republic and was published a few days before President Clinton's 1994 State of the Union address. An internal memo by tobacco company Philip Morris, dated March 1994, indicated that representatives of Philip Morris had collaborated with McCaughey when she was writing "No Exit": "Worked off-the-record with Manhattan and writer Betsy McCaughey as part of the input to the three-part exposé in The New Republic on what the Clinton plan means to you. The first part detailed specifics of the plan." (When the memo was discussed in a 2009 story in Rolling Stone, McCaughey declined to comment.)
McCaughey's "No Exit" article was quickly used by conservative officials and commentators seeking to discredit the Clinton plan. Senator Bob Dole, in the Republican Party response to the President's State of the Union, used some of McCaughey's arguments of fewer choices, lower quality, and more government control. Bill Kristol's Project for the Republican Future quickly launched television advertisements featuring quotes from McCaughey's two Wall Street Journal op-ed columns and her The New Republic article. Newsweek columnist George Will used McCaughey's writings as a basis for predicting that the Clinton health plan would kill patients and make it illegal for patients to pay doctors directly for care, with 15-year jail terms for patients who tried to do so.
The Clinton White House press office issued a response to McCaughey's "No Exit" article by arguing that it contained "numerous factual inaccuracies and misleading statements". McCaughey responded that her claims came "straight from the text of the bill". Supporters of the Clinton plan questioned McCaughey's claims, including her statements that "the law will prevent you from going outside the system to buy basic health coverage you think is better" and that "doctor[s] can be paid only by the plan, not by you" by pointing to the text of the legislation such as Section 1003: "Nothing in this Act shall be construed as prohibiting ... An individual from purchasing any health care services."
According to The Washington Post, the "No Exit" article, the White House response, and the ensuing television and radio interviews with McCaughey made her a star: "Her toothy good looks, body-conscious suits, Vassar BA and Columbia PhD reduced right-wingers to mush."
The bill stalled and died in Congress in 1994, and the next year, Clinton was reduced to asking Congress for a series of small, incremental reforms to healthcare. The "No Exit" article won the National Magazine Award for excellence in the public interest. Andrew Sullivan, the editor of The New Republic, later stated that he believed there were flaws in McCaughey's article, but he ran it "as a provocation to debate". In 2006, a new editor recanted the story.
In 2009, The Daily Beast called her "The Woman Who Killed Health Care". In a 2010 article about misinformation surrounding healthcare reform efforts in the United States, political scientist Brendan Nyhan argued that McCaughey's articles about Clinton's healthcare reform were both highly influential in shaping debate on the subject and misleading, owing in part to "egregious errors" she made in reading and interpreting the proposals.
New York Lieutenant Governorship, 1995–1998 After winning the election, Pataki told The New York Times, McCaughey would have "very real and significant responsibilities" as lieutenant governor. McCaughey was initially tasked by Pataki to work on education policy and on reducing New York's Medicaid budget. By January 1995, McCaughey had produced a set of recommendations that required cost cutting by hospitals and nursing homes so that the poor did not have to bear the entire burden of balancing the state's Medicaid budget by a reduction of their benefits. However, McCaughey's recommendations were largely ignored.