Speaker biographies

Joseph Antos is the Wilson H. Taylor Scholar in Health Care and Retirement Policy at AEI and an adjunct professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Public Health. Prior to coming to AEI, Mr. Antos served as assistant director for health and human resources at the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the division within the CBO that provides Congress with analyses of proposed changes to federal programs and policies in areas such as health, income security, education, employment, and housing. Mr. Antos was the director of the Office of Research and Demonstrations and deputy director of the Office of the Actuary at the Health Care Financing Administration. He served as deputy chief of staff and the principal deputy assistant secretary for management and budget at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Melinda Beeuwkes Buntin is a health economist; co-director of the Center for Health Care Organization, Economics, and Finance; and co-director of the new Bing Center for Health Economics at RAND. She is beginning a major study for the California HealthCare Foundation on the effects of evolving health plan designs—including consumer-directed plans—on health care costs, use, and quality. She is also concluding a project to monitor the effects of Medicare’s inpatient rehabilitation facility prospective payment system and to refine that payment system. She also conducted two recent studies related to the Medicare program on hospice care and post-acute care for joint replacement patients. She has 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.

Philip Ellis is a senior analyst in the health and human resources division of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). During his tenure he has helped to estimate the cost of the Medicare prescription drug benefit and other proposed Medicare reforms and to analyze the effects of disease management programs and the spending patterns of high-cost Medicare beneficiaries. His current areas of focus include health savings accounts and Medicaid reform. Prior to joining the CBO, he worked on Medicare reform issues in the office of the assistant secretary for planning and evaluation at the Department of Health and Human Services, and at the Treasury Department.

Amy Finkelstein is an assistant professor of economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Her research focuses on two main areas: market failures and government intervention in insurance markets, and the impact of public policy on the health-care sector, particularly on the development and diffusion of medical technology. Prior to joining the MIT faculty, she was a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.

Mark Freeland is deputy director of the National Health Statistics Group in the Office of the Actuary, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. He and his colleagues, along with Dale Jorgenson and associates, are currently working on seventy-five-year projections of national health expenditures within the context of gross domestic product (GDP), as required by the Medicare Modernization Act. Mr. Freeland also oversees work on Medicare provider margins (payment adequacy issues). He has worked on developing price indexes for updating Medicare provider payments, productivity adjustments for Medicare updates, and frameworks for revising Medicare payments. Along with colleagues, Mr. Freeland is working on a monograph that attempts to explain why health-care costs have historically risen at such high rates relative to the growth in GDP. The monograph uses econometrics to disentangle the relative contributions of insurance, income, technology, medical research and development, demographics, and other factors contributing to this persistent and unsustainable pace of growth.

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