Socialized medicine is a term used in the United States to describe and discuss systems of universal health care: medical and hospital care for all by means of government regulation of health care and subsidies derived from taxation. Because of historically negative associations with socialism in American culture, the term is usually used pejoratively in American political discourse. The term was first widely used in the United States by advocates of the American Medical Association in opposition to President Harry S. Truman's 1947 health-care initiative. It was later used in opposition to Medicare.
Robert Merton Solow, GCIH, is an American economist, particularly known for his work on the theory of economic growth that culminated in the exogenous growth model named after him. He is currently Emeritus Institute Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has been a professor since 1949. He was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal in 1961, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1987, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014. Four of his PhD students, George Akerlof, Joseph Stiglitz, Peter Diamond and William Nordhaus later received Nobel Memorial Prizes in Economic Sciences in their own right.
Mark Barr McClellan is the Director of the Robert J Margolis Center for Health Policy and the Margolis Professor of Business, Medicine and Health Policy at Duke University. Formerly, he was a senior fellow and director of the Health Care Innovation and Value Initiative at the Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform at The Brookings Institution, in Washington, D.C. McClellan served as Commissioner of the United States Food and Drug Administration under President George W. Bush from 2002 through 2004, and subsequently as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services from 2004 through 2006.
The Tuck School of Business is the graduate business school of Dartmouth College, an Ivy League research university in Hanover, New Hampshire. Founded in 1900 through a donation made by Dartmouth alumnus Edward Tuck, the Tuck School was the first institution in the world to offer a master's degree in business administration.
The quality-adjusted life year or quality-adjusted life-year (QALY) is a generic measure of disease burden, including both the quality and the quantity of life lived. It is used in economic evaluation to assess the value for money of medical interventions. One QALY equates to one year in perfect health. If an individual's health is below this maximum, QALYs are accrued at a rate of less than 1 per year. To be dead is associated with 0 QALYs. QALYs can be used to inform personal decisions, to evaluate programs, and to set priorities for future programs.
Paul Michael Romer is an American economist who is a University Professor at New York University. He was a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2018. A pioneer of endogenous growth theory, he received the prize "for integrating technological innovations into long-run macroeconomic analysis".
Susan Carleton Athey is an American economist. She is The Economics of Technology Professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Prior to joining Stanford, she was a professor at Harvard University. She is the first female winner of the John Bates Clark Medal. She currently serves as a long-term consultant to Microsoft as well as a consulting researcher to Microsoft Research.
John E. "Jack" Wennberg is the pioneer and leading researcher of unwarranted variation in the healthcare industry. In four decades of work, Wennberg has documented the geographic variation in the healthcare that patients receive in the United States. In 1988, he founded the Center for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences at Dartmouth Medical School to address that unwarranted variation in healthcare.
The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice (TDI) is an organization within Dartmouth College "dedicated to improving health care through education, research, policy reform, leadership improvement, and communication with patients and the public." It was founded in 1988 by John Wennberg as the Center for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences (CECS); a reorganization in 2007 led to TDI's current structure.
Demographic economics or population economics is the application of economic analysis to demography, the study of human populations, including size, growth, density, distribution, and vital statistics.
Joseph P. Newhouse is an American economist and the John D. MacArthur Professor of Health Policy and Management at Harvard University, as well as the Director of the Division of Health Policy Research and of the Interfaculty Initiative on Health Policy. At Harvard, he is a member of the four faculties at Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge, Harvard Medical School in Boston, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, and Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge.
Amy Nadya Finkelstein is a Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the co-Director and research associate of the Public Economics Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the co-Scientific Director of J-PAL North America. She was awarded the 2012 John Bates Clark Medal for her contributions to economics. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and won a MacArthur "Genius" fellowship in 2018.
Janet Currie is a Canadian-American economist. She is the Henry Putnam Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University and the Director of Princeton's Center for Health and Wellbeing. She served as the Chair of the Department of Economics at Princeton from 2014-2018. She also served as the first female Chair of the Department of Economics at Columbia University from 2006-2009. Before Columbia, she taught at the University of California, Los Angeles. She was named one of the top 10 women in economics by the World Economic Forum in July 2015. She was recognized for her mentorship of younger economists with the Carolyn Shaw Bell award from the American Economics Association in 2015. Currie won the NOMIS Distinguished Scientist Award in 2019. She was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in April 2019.
Daniel Barton Oerther is an American Professor of Environmental Health Engineering. He is best known for the use of 16S ribosomal RNA-targeted techniques for fundamental studies of the ecology of bacteria in engineered and natural systems, for the use of community-based participatory research to create and evaluate programs and policies to improve access to clean water, nutritious food, and energy efficiency in developing communities, and for innovation in the scholarship of teaching and learning.
Annamaria Lusardi is an Italian-born economist and the Denit Trust Distinguished Scholar and Professor of Economics and Accountancy at The George Washington University School of Business, where she also serves as the Academic Director of the Global Financial Literacy Excellence Center. Her interests focus on financial literacy and financial education, and she is considered an authority in those fields.
Heidi Williams is a Professor in Economics at Stanford University and a member of the National Bureau of Economic Research. She is a graduate of Dartmouth College, and of Harvard University for her PhD in Economics. Prior to Stanford, Williams was an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Pinelopi "Penny" Koujianou Goldberg is the chief economist of the World Bank and holds the named chair of Elihu Professor of Economics at Yale University.
Elliott S. Fisher is a health policy researcher and advocate for improving health system performance in the United States. He helped develop the concept of accountable care organizations and championed their adoption by Medicare. The development of the Affordable Care Act was influenced by his research on disparities in healthcare spending and utilization across the United States. He has strongly supported a rapid transition from fee-for-service to pay-for-performance models in the U.S. healthcare industry. He is a tenured faculty member at Dartmouth College, where he teaches in the Masters in Public Health program. In April 2019, he was removed as director of The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice after an investigation into misconduct in the workplace.
Nina Pavcnik is the Niehaus Family Professor in International Studies for the Economics Department at Dartmouth College.
Kathleen M. McGarry is a Professor of Economics at the University of California, Los Angeles and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. She is also a co-investigator of the Health and Retirement Survey. From 2007 to 2009, she was Joel Z. and Susan Hyatt ‘72 Professor in the Department of Economics at Dartmouth College. She has served on the Editorial Boards of the American Economic Journal: Public Policy, the American Journal of Health Economics, and the Journal of Pension Economics.
