Speaker Biographies
Thomas P. Miller is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he researches health policy, with particular emphasis information transparency, health insurance regulation, and consumer-driven health care. He is also a member of the National Advisory Council of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Before joining AEI, Mr. Miller served for three years as senior health economist for the Joint Economic Committee, where he organized a series of hearings focusing on promising reforms in private health care markets and drafted several social security reform bills. He also has been director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute and director of economic policy studies at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Mr. Miller’s writing has appeared in such publications as Health Affairs, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Reader’s Digest, National Review, the Journal of Law and Contemporary Problems, Regulation, and Cato Journal. He has testified before various Congressional committees on issues such as Medicare prescription drug benefits, medical savings accounts, and tax credits for health insurance.
Peter R. Orszag is the seventh director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). His four-year term began on January 18, 2007. Before joining CBO, Dr. Orszag was the Joseph A. Pechman senior fellow and deputy director of Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution. While at Brookings, he also served as director of The Hamilton Project, which provides a platform for scholars to offer proposals for promoting broad-based economic growth; director of the Retirement Security Project, which focuses on promoting retirement security; and codirector of the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture with the Urban Institute providing analysis of tax issues. In previous government service during 1997 and 1998, Dr. Orszag served as special assistant to the President for Economic Policy and senior economic adviser at the National Economic Council. In 1995 and 1996, he was senior adviser and senior economist at the President's Council of Economic Advisers. His first appointment with the Council was as a staff economist in 1993 and 1994. He has coauthored a number of books, including Protecting the Homeland 2006/7 (2006), Aging Gracefully: Ideas to Improve Retirement Security in America (2006), and Saving Social Security: A Balanced Approach (2004), and coedited American Economic Policy in the 1990s (2002). His main areas of research have been pensions, Social Security, budget policy, higher education policy, homeland security, macroeconomics, and tax policy--topics on which he has published widely in academic journals.
Kent Smetters is an associate professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He worked for the U.S. Congress from 1995–98 before joining the University in Pennsylvania in 1998 as an assistant professor. He was the Kaiser Visiting Professor of Economics in the Economics Department at Stanford University during the 2000–01 academic year. He was appointed deputy assistant secretary for economic policy of the U.S. Treasury on July 3, 2001, where he served until August 30, 2002. He remains active in Washington, DC, and recently served as a member of the Blue Ribbon Panel on Dynamic Scoring for the Joint Committee on Taxation of the U.S. Congress.
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