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Research/Interests
My major area of research is health care spending; specifically the factors that will drive health care spending in the future. I have spent the last several years concentrating on the factors that have slowed the growth rate of prescription drug spending and the outlook for growth in this sector over the next 10 years.
One of major responsibilities at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is making 10-year projections of national health spending. I participate on a team that updates these projections annually and writes an article that appears each February in the journal Health Affairs. The most recent paper can be seen here. Each year, we get a lot of attention from the media and the research community when this article is published; the 2008 article was in the top 5 most downloaded papers on the Health Affairs website. In fact, this paper has landed me on the cover of Modern Healthcare magazine in both 2006 and 2008.
During a recession, there is a lot more interest from the general public in economics. However, one of the major things that I stress while teaching my introductory economics courses is that the key principles of economics are very relevant to each of us and important for each of us to understand fully. Retailers, the government, and even your family attempt to change your behavior by changing your incentives like providing a discount, increasing the cigarette tax, or giving a reward if you do a chore. Economics is not just about money; it is about making the best use of all of your scarce resources, including your time. The principles of economics still apply to the super-wealthy like Bill Gates because we all only have 24 hours in a day.
