Speaker biographies

Alex Brill is a research fellow at AEI. Prior to joining AEI earlier this year, he served for five years on the staff of the House Ways and Means Committee, where he was senior advisor to the chairman and chief economist. In this capacity he led the staff in work on major tax, pension, trade, and health legislation, and oversaw efforts to expand the analytical capability of the Joint Committee on Taxation’s revenue-estimating process. In addition to providing legislative and policy counsel to the chairman, Brill advised committee members about the effects of various tax, trade, health, and social security proposals and general economic trends. Prior to his work at Ways and Means, he served on the staff of the White House Council of Economic Advisers and began his career in Washington as a research assistant at AEI. He has written on a variety of tax policy issues.

Mark R. Cullen, M.D., is both professor of medicine and public health and program director of the Occupational and Environmental Medicine Program (OEM) at Yale University School of Medicine. Early in his career, Dr. Cullen's teaching interests focused on introducing modern occupational and environmental medicine concepts of clinical epidemiology as a counterpart to the prevailing approaches of populational epidemiology and animal toxicology.  To achieve this goal he believed physicians and researchers would need to be trained at a far higher level, incorporating extensive training in epidemiology and toxicology.  His efforts culminated in the establishment of the Occupational and Environmental Medicine Program in 1979 within the Department of Internal Medicine and the OEM Fellowship in 1985.  OEM has become a part of the curricula of many medical schools and clinical training programs in internal medicine. Dr. Cullen serves as consultant to several large corporations and is an advocate of developing research collaborations between the private and academic sectors.  In addition to his teaching, research, and clinical activities, he serves on many national and international advisory committees.  At the Institute of Medicine he has been active on committees relating to manpower, training, and curricula in Occupational and Environmental Medicine; and has been a peer reviewer on publications concerning Agent Orange and the Persian Gulf War.  In 1997 he was named to the Board of Scientific Counselors at NIOSH and elected to the Institute of Medicine. Dr. Cullen has published extensively in numerous medical/scientific journals and co-edits the Textbook of Clinical Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 1st and 2nd editions.

A. Mark Fendrick, M.D., is a professor of internal medicine in the School of Medicine and a professor of health management and policy in the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan. He directs the Health Services Research Core Laboratory and is codirector of the recently established Center for Value-Based Insurance Design at the University of Michigan. Dr. Fendrick’s research focuses on the clinical and economic assessment of medical interventions, with special attention to how technological innovation influences clinical practice and impacts health-care systems. He has authored over 200 articles and book chapters and lectures frequently on the health and cost implications of medical interventions to diverse audiences around the world. Dr. Fendrick remains clinically active in the practice of general internal medicine. He is the coeditor in chief of the American Journal of Managed Care and is an editorial board member of three additional peer-reviewed publications. His perspective and understanding of clinical and economic issues have fostered collaborations with numerous government agencies, health plans, professional societies, and health-care companies. He serves on the Medicare Coverage Advisory Committee. Dr. Fendrick has served on the board of directors of the International Society for Technology Assessment in Health Care and the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research.

Mark V. Pauly is the Bendheim Professor in the Department of Health Care Systems at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is a professor of health care systems, insurance and risk management, and business and public policy at the Wharton School, and is a professor of economics in the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. Mr. Pauly is a former commissioner on the Physician Payment Review Commission and an active member of the Institute of Medicine. One of the nation’s leading health economists, Mr. Pauly has made significant contributions to the fields of medical economics and health insurance, particularly with respect to reducing the number of uninsured individuals through tax credits for public and private insurance, and appropriate design for Medicare in a budget-constrained environment. Mr. Pauly is a coeditor in chief of the International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics and an associate editor of the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty. He has served on Institute of Medicine panels on public accountability for health insurers under Medicare and on improving the financing of vaccines. He is an appointed member of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services National Advisory Committee to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

Bill Thomas, former chairman of the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee, is a visiting fellow at AEI. He served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1978–2007, most recently representing California’s Twenty-Second Congressional District, which covered most of Kern and San Luis Obispo Counties and part of Los Angeles County. Thomas was elected chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee in January 2001 and served until January 2007. During his chairmanship, Thomas guided the enactment of $2 trillion in tax relief, including the Economic Growth and Tax Reconciliation Act of 2001, which reduced all ordinary income tax rates; the Jobs and Growth Tax Reconciliation Act of 2003, which reduced the tax rate on dividends and capital gains; and the Job Creation Act of 2004, which provided significant reforms for corporate tax policy. Prior to his election as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, Thomas served as chairman of the Ways and Means Health Subcommittee. He was also chairman of the House Administration Committee from 1995–2001. Before entering Congress, he was a faculty member at Bakersfield Community College and a member of the California State Assembly.

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