About the Contributors
Linda J. Blumberg is an economist and senior research associate at the Urban Institute. Her recent work includes a variety of projects related to private health insurance and health care financing, including estimating the coverage and risk pool impacts of tax credit proposals and public insurance expansions, estimating price elasticities of employers offering and workers taking up health insurance, studying the effects of insurance market reforms on the risk pool of the privately insured, and performing a series of analyses of the working uninsured. From August 1993 through October 1994, Dr. Blumberg served as health policy advisor to the Clinton administration during its initial health care reform effort.
Michael Chernew is an associate professor in the Departments of Health Management and Policy, Internal Medicine, and Economics at the University of Michigan's School of Public Health. He is coeditor of the American Journal of Managed Care and codirector of The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Scholars in Health Policy Research program at the University of Michigan. Dr. Chernew is also a faculty research fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and he is on the editorial boards of Health Services Research, Health Affairs, and Medical Care Research and Review. In 2000, he served on a technical advisory panel for the Health Care Financing Administration that reviewed the assumptions used by the Medicare actuaries to assess the financial status of the Medicare trust funds.
Sarah Crow is an analyst with Berkeley Policy Associates, a social welfare research firm in Oakland, California. She has over five years' experience studying health policy, and was formerly a research associate at the Economic Research Initiative on the Uninsured.
Jonathan Gruber is a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has taught since 1992. He is also the director of the Program on Children at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he is a research associate. Dr. Gruber's research focuses on the areas of public finance and health economics. His recent areas of particular interest include the economics of employer-provided health insurance, the efficiency of our current system of delivering health care to the indigent, the effect of the Social Security program on retirement behavior, and the economics of smoking. During the 1997-1998 academic year, Dr. Gruber served as deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the Treasury Department.
Mary Harrington is a research investigator for the Economic Research Initiative on the Uninsured (ERIU) at the University of Michigan. Prior to joining ERIU, she was a senior researcher at Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., where her research focused primarily on Medicaid, managed care, child health, and safety net programs and providers. An expert in qualitative research methods, Ms. Harrington has designed and led numerous multisite evaluations and policy assessments. Her recent work includes lead roles in two national evaluations (for ASPE and for CMS) of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).
Richard Hirth is an associate professor in the Health Management and Policy department at the University of Michigan's School of Public Health. He has received several research awards, including the Kenneth Arrow Award in Health Economics from the International Health Economics Association. His research interests include the role of not-for-profit providers in health care markets, health insurance, the relationship between managed care and the adoption and utilization of medical technologies, long-term care, and the economics of end stage renal disease care. Dr. Hirth teaches courses in microeconomics and health economics.
Karl Kronebusch is an associate professor of health policy in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at Yale University, where his research and teaching interests focus on the politics of health and social policy. His published research has examined several aspects of participation in social programs, including the impacts of mandated Medicaid expansions, the effects of welfare reform, and the effectiveness of policies designed to improve program take-up rates. He is also examining the impacts of managed care regulation and patient protection legislation in the states. He has previously served on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and has been a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Scholar.
Hanns Kuttner is a senior research associate at the Economic Research Initiative on the Uninsured. His work focuses on making research results accessible to policy and general audiences. His research focuses on understanding coverage dynamics as well as the factors associated with changes in coverage status. Prior to joining ERIU, Mr. Kuttner served as a staff member of the Illinois Governor's Task Force on Human Services Reform and the District of Columbia's Tax Revision Commission. He also worked for the Health Care Financing Administration at the Department of Health and Human Services, and was a part of George H. W. Bush's White House policy staff working on health and social issues.
Helen G. Levy is an assistant professor in the Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies. From 1998 to 2000, she was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar in Health Policy Research at the University of California at Berkeley. She has also served as a research analyst for The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and is a faculty research fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Her research interests include the areas of health economics, public finance, and labor economics. Her most recent work explores the financial consequences of poor health for households without health insurance and the spending patterns of insured and uninsured households.
Brigitte Madrian is an associate professor of Business and Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She served on the faculty at Harvard University and the University of Chicago before moving to the University of Pennsylvania in 2003. Her research focuses on issues in labor and public economics, including the relationship between employer-provided health insurance and labor market outcomes, and employee savings behavior in 401(k) plans.
David O. Meltzer is an associate professor in the Department of Medicine and an associated faculty member of the Harris School and the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago. His research explores problems in health economics and public policy. A major area of Dr. Meltzer's research examines the theoretical foundations of medical cost-effectiveness analysis, including issues such as accounting for future costs due to the extension of life and the empirical validity of quality of life assessment, which he has examined in the context of diabetes and prostate cancer. Another major area of study examines the effects of managed care and medical specialization on the cost and quality of care, especially in teaching hospitals.
Len Nichols is vice president of the Center for Studying Health System Change. He provides leadership in shaping the research of the Center to inform the policy process in a timely and nonpartisan way, in addition to continuing his own research related to private health insurance and health care markets. Before joining the Center, he served as a principal research associate at the Urban Institute. During the first two years of the Clinton administration, Dr. Nichols was the senior advisor for health policy at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). He managed and coordinated cost and revenue estimation for President Clinton's Health Security Act (HSA) and its congressional successors. Prior to his service at OMB, Dr. Nichols was a visiting Public Health Service Fellow at the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research, and served as an associate professor and Economics Department chair at Wellesley College.
Harold Pollack is associate professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration. His recent research concerns HIV and hepatitis prevention efforts for injection drug users, drug abuse and dependence among welfare recipients and pregnant women, infant mortality prevention, and child health. In addition, Dr. Pollack has been appointed to two committees of the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine. His work appears in such journals as Journal of the American Medical Association, Medical Decision Making, Pediatrics, and Social Service Review.
Pamela Farley Short is a professor of health policy and administration at Penn State University and director of Penn State's Center for Health Care and Policy Research, specializing in the economics of health and health care. Before joining the faculty of Penn State in 1997, she was a senior economist in the Washington office of RAND and director of RAND's Center for the Study of Employee Health Benefits. For a number of years, Dr. Short was a senior manager in the intramural research program of the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. She also worked in the White House for the Council of Economic Advisers as the senior staff economist for health care issues and is particularly well known for her expertise regarding the uninsured and underinsured. Dr. Short's research emphasizes the study of changes in individuals' lives over time, recently with regard to movement in and out of health insurance programs, retirement and employment transitions, and the unfolding experiences of cancer survivors.
