The Incidental Economist is a blog focused on health economics and policy. It was founded in 2009 by Austin Frakt, a health economist at Boston University, who has since been joined by Aaron Carroll, a pediatrician at Indiana University School of Medicine, as co-Editor-in-Chief. The site features posts by the two as well as a number of contributing writers, who are primarily academics based across the United States. The authors often synthesize academic literature as it might relate to contemporary health policy issues.
The blog gained prominence in 2009–10 when it was often cited by journalists, such as Ezra Klein, [1] Kevin Drum, [2] Jonathan Cohn [3] and Andrew Sullivan, [4] [5] who were covering the health care reform process that would eventually culminate in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The blog remains one of the most widely cited health policy blogs on the Internet. [6]
David Matthew Cutler is an American economist who is the Otto Eckstein Professor of Applied Economics at Harvard University. He was given a five-year term appointment of Harvard College Professor, which recognizes excellence in undergraduate teaching. He holds a joint appointment in the economics department and at Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard School of Public Health, is a faculty member for the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, and serves as commissioner on the Massachusetts Health Policy Commission.
Jonathan Scott Cohn is an American author and journalist who writes mainly on United States public policy and political issues. Formerly the executive editor of The American Prospect and a senior editor at The New Republic, Cohn is now a senior national correspondent at The Huffington Post.
Ezra Klein is an American journalist, political analyst, New York Times columnist, and the host of The Ezra Klein Show podcast. He is a co-founder of Vox and formerly was the website's editor-at-large. He has held editorial positions at The Washington Post and The American Prospect, and was a regular contributor to Bloomberg News and MSNBC. His first book, Why We're Polarized, was published by Simon & Schuster in January 2020.
Jonathan Holmes Gruber is an American professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has taught since 1992. He is also the director of the Health Care Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he is a research associate. An associate editor of both the Journal of Public Economics and the Journal of Health Economics, Gruber has been heavily involved in crafting public health policy.
David Leonhardt is an American journalist and columnist. Since April 30, 2020, he has written the daily "The Morning" newsletter for The New York Times. He also contributes to the paper's Sunday Review section. His column previously appeared weekly in The New York Times. He previously wrote the paper's daily e-mail newsletter, which bore his own name. As of October 2018, he also co-hosted "The Argument", a weekly opinion podcast with Ross Douthat and Michelle Goldberg.
Kevin Werbach is an American academic, businessman and author. In 2002, he founded the Supernova Group, a technology analysis and consulting firm. Since 2004, Werbach is an Associate Professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He writes about business, policy, and social implications of emerging Internet and communications technologies.
The history of health care reform in the United States has spanned many decades with health care reform having been the subject of political debate since the early part of the 20th century. Recent reforms remain an active political issue. Alternative reform proposals were offered by both of the major candidates in the 2008, 2016, and 2020 presidential elections.
A health insurance mandate is either an employer or individual mandate to obtain private health insurance instead of a national health insurance plan.
Megan McArdle is an American columnist and blogger based in Washington, D.C. She writes for The Washington Post, mostly about economics, finance, and government policy.
The Affordable Care Act (ACA), formally known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) and colloquially as Obamacare, is a landmark U.S. federal statute enacted by the 111th United States Congress and signed into law by President Barack Obama on March 23, 2010. Together with the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 amendment, it represents the U.S. healthcare system's most significant regulatory overhaul and expansion of coverage since the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965.
Health Services Research is a peer-reviewed healthcare journal published bimonthly by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the Health Research and Educational Trust. In addition, it is an official journal of AcademyHealth. The editor-in-chief is Austin Frakt. The journal covers research, methods, and concepts related to the financing, organization, delivery, evaluation, and outcomes of health services.
The Oregon health insurance experiment was a research study looking at the effects of the 2008 Medicaid expansion in the U.S. state of Oregon, which occurred based on lottery drawings from a waiting list and thus offered an opportunity to conduct a randomized experiment by comparing a control group of lottery losers to a treatment group of winners, who were eligible to apply for enrollment in the Medicaid expansion program after previously being uninsured.
Rashi Fein was an American health economist termed "a father of Medicare" in the United States and "an architect of Medicare", was Professor of Economics of Medicine, Emeritus, in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and the author of the book Medical Care, Medical Costs: The Search for a Health Insurance Policy.
Vox is an American news and opinion website owned by Vox Media. The website was founded in April 2014 by Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, and Melissa Bell, and is noted for its concept of explanatory journalism. Vox's media presence also includes a YouTube channel, several podcasts, and a show presented on Netflix. Vox has been described as left-leaning and progressive.
Austin B. Frakt is an American health economist who holds positions with the Department of Veterans Affairs, Boston University, University of Pennsylvania and Harvard. He is widely known as the founder and co-editor-in-chief of The Incidental Economist. His academic research has been published in major academic journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine and Health Affairs. Frakt supports the use of mainstream media as a means of translating academic research into policy relevance and has contributed to outlets including The New York Times and Bloomberg News. He serves on editorial boards of the academic journals Health Services Research and The American Journal of Managed Care and is a member of the New England Comparative Effectiveness Public Advisory Council.
Aaron Edward Carroll is an American pediatrician and professor of pediatrics at Indiana University School of Medicine. Carroll is a Distinguished Professor of Pediatrics and Chief Health Officer at Indiana University. He is also an Associate Dean for Research Mentoring and the director of the Center for Pediatric and Adolescent Comparative Effectiveness Research at Indiana University School of Medicine.
Benjamin Daniel Sommers is an American physician and health economist. He is a professor of Health Policy and Economics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a primary care physician (PCP) at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. He was appointed by President Joe Biden to be a Deputy Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (DASPE) for Health Policy (HP) at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in 2021. His term expired in January 2023. He is regarded as an national authority on Medicare and Medicaid. He currently lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Mark V. Pauly is an American economist whose work focuses on healthcare management and business economics. He is currently the Bendheim Professor in the Department of Health Care Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Pauly is a former commissioner on the Physician Payment Review Commission, and has been a consultant to the Congressional Budget Office, the Office of the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the American Enterprise Institute, and served on the Medicare Technical Advisory Panel. He is also the Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Springer journal International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics, and was formerly the Robert D. Eilers Professor from 1984 to 1989.
Ashish Kumar Jha is an Indian-American general internist physician and academic who served as the White House COVID-19 response coordinator from 2022–2023. He has been Dean of the Brown University School of Public Health since 2020. Prior to Brown, he was the K.T. Li Professor of Global Health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, faculty director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, and a Senior Advisor at Albright Stonebridge Group. Jha is recognized as one of the leading health policy scholars in the nation. Jha's role at Brown University focuses on improving the quality and cost of health care, and on the impact of public health policy.
Nicolas Robert Ziebarth is a university professor at the University of Mannheim and the ZEW- the Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research. Since 2022, he is head of their Research Unit "Labour Markets and Social Insurance." Since its founding in 2021, he served as a tenured Associate Professor in Cornell's Brooks School of Public Policy and the Department of Economics. Prior to that, he was an Assistant Professor (2011-2017) and then tenured Associate Professor (2017-2021) in Cornell's Department of Policy Analysis and Management.