Speaker Biographies
November 18, 2005

Roger Feldman is the Blue Cross professor of health insurance and professor of economics at the University of Minnesota. Mr. Feldman’s research covers the organization, financing, and delivery of health care with a focus on health insurance. He also studies competition among health care providers and insurers. Currently, he is evaluating the effect of “consumer directed” health plans on medical care utilization and personal savings decisions. Mr. Feldman’s experience in health care policy includes serving on the senior staff of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, where he was the lead author of a chapter in the 1985 Economic Report of the President. From 1988 to 1992, he directed one of the four national research centers sponsored by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). He advised CMS on the design of a demonstration of competitive pricing for Medicare M+C plans and, recently, provided advice to the assistant secretary for Planning and Evaluation (HHS) on the potential for health savings accounts to reduce the un-insurance rate in the U.S. Mr. Feldman is a regular contributor to journals in economics and health services research. His research has received four “best paper” awards from the Association for Health Services Research and the National Institute of Health Care Management. He has been a consultant to the U.S. Department of Justice and several state regulatory agencies regarding health plan mergers and ownership changes.

Stephen T. Parente is an assistant professor in the Department of Finance and deputy director of the Medical Industry Leadership Institute in the Carlson School of Management at University of Minnesota. His areas of research are health economics, health insurance, medical technology evaluation, and health information technology. He has extensive experience directing empirical analyses utilizing primary and secondary databases and is acknowledged as a national expert on using administrative databases, particularly Medicare and health insurer data, for health policy research. He has served as a consultant to several of the largest health care organizations including: UnitedHealth Group, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Johnson and Johnson, Medtronic, Pfizer, Merck, Johns Hopkins Hospital, and various government agencies. Mr. Parente has recently concluded several studies on topics including: the impact of Medicare HMO market exit on elderly patients; identifying patterns of controlled substance misuse within health plans as a patient safety tool; and the impact of consumer health benefit knowledge on medical care demand and cost of the elderly. Prior to joining the University of Minnesota faculty, Mr. Parente gained a broad range of private and public sector health finance and policy experience by serving as a legislative fellow in the U.S. Senate during the Bush and Clinton Administrations' health reform initiatives. 

Parmeeth “Par” Atwal is deputy editor of Health Affairs and has been with the journal for four and a half years. He received his undergraduate degree in political science and M.A. in social sciences from the University of Chicago. He went on to receive his J.D. from the Albany Law School of Union University where he was a member of the editorial board of the Albany Law Review for two years. He then received his Master of Public Health with specialization in management and finance from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. His law practice focused on health care issues affecting community health centers, the medically uninsured and underinsured, Medicaid, and people with HIV/AIDS. Mr. Atwal has also been a speaker at the National Association of Community Health Centers' annual meeting, the Academy-Health’s annual research meeting, and the Center for Global Development's annual policy research network conference.

Melinda Beeuwkes Buntin is a health economist at RAND and co-director of the RAND Center for Health Care Organization, Economics, and Finance. She is completing a pilot project for the California HealthCare Foundation that lays the groundwork for a major study of the effects of evolving health plan designs, including consumer-directed plans, on care costs, use, and quality. She is also leading a project to monitor the effects of Medicare's inpatient rehabilitation facility prospective payment system in order to refine the payment system. Her other recent projects include evaluating a randomized trial of diabetes, congestive heart failure, and asthma disease management and a study of the market for individual health insurance policies in California. She has also worked on projects and published in the areas of Medicare physician payment rates, the financing of end-of-life care, and Medicare managed care plan design and payment.

Robert B. Helms is a resident scholar in health policy studies at AEI. He has written and lectured extensively on health policy, health economics, and the economics of the pharmaceutical industry. Mr. Helms currently participates in the Consensus Group, an informal task force that is developing market-oriented health reform concepts. He also serves on the National Advisory Council for Healthcare Research and Quality of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (2005–2007) and on the Department of Health and Human Services’ Medicaid Commission (2005–2006). Mr. Helms is the editor of several AEI publications on health policy, including American Health Policy: Critical Issues for Reform; Health Policy Reform: Competition and Controls; Competitive Strategies in the Pharmaceutical Industry; and Medicare in the 21st Century: Seeking Fair and Efficient Reform. He has also written on the history of Medicare, the tax treatment of health insurance, and international comparisons of health systems. From 1981 to 1989 he served as assistant secretary for planning and evaluation and deputy assistant secretary for health policy in the Department of Health and Human Services.

Jack Rodgers is the managing director of the Health Policy Economics Practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers and has more than twenty-five years of experience with federal health policy and legislation related to health services and prescription drugs. He has written extensively about issues such as health insurance coverage, Medicare provider reimbursement, and Medicaid expansions. Mr. Rodgers built computer simulation models to estimate the federal budgetary costs of major national programs ranging from employer-mandated health insurance coverage to early Medicaid coverage for HIV. At the Congressional Budget Office, Mr. Rodgers worked on the first Bush Administration’s proposals to expand coverage and authored the CBO report, Selected Options for Expanding Health Insurance Coverage. At PricewaterhouseCoopers, he served as a consultant to the Clinton Interagency Task Force on Health Reform as a member of the Cost Advisory Group that assisted the task force in reconciling the results from competing simulation models developed by different government agencies. Most recently, Mr. Rodgers has worked on a variety of prescription drug issues ranging from out-of-pocket drug expenses of Medicare beneficiaries to the effects of medical savings accounts on drug utilization.  His comprehensive analysis of the impact of the benefit, The Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit: Potential Impact on Beneficiaries, was published by AARP in November 2004. Before joining PricewaterhouseCoopers, Mr. Rodgers was the principal analyst for health spending at the Congressional Budget Office for nine years.