Jessica S. Banthin is a senior fellow in the Health Policy Center, where she studies the effects of health insurance reform policies on coverage, costs, and households’ financial burdens. Before joining the Urban Institute, she served more than 25 years in the federal government, most recently as deputy director for health at the Congressional Budget Office. During her eight-year term at the Congressional Budget Office, Banthin directed the production of numerous major cost estimates of legislative proposals to modify the Affordable Care Act.

Banthin has also conducted significant research on a wide range of topics such as the burdens of health care premiums and out-of-pocket costs on families, prescription drug spending, and employer and nongroup market premiums. She has special expertise in the design of microsimulation models for analyzing health insurance coverage and an extensive background in the design and use of household and employer survey data. Banthin served on the President’s Task Force on National Health Care Reform in 1993 and participated in an interagency work group on improving the measurement of income and poverty in 1998 that led to the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure. Banthin earned her AB cum laude from Harvard University and her PhD in economics from the University of Maryland, College Park.

Jessica Banthin has served on the advisory board for the Cancer Policy Institute since 2020.