The Economy and Health: Challenges and Opportunities

Dr. Brittany L. Brown-Podgorski is an Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Management in the Graduate School of Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Brown-Podgorski earned her PhD in Health Policy and Management from the Indiana University Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health. Her research examines the policy environment as a social determinant of health and health disparities. She is particularly interested in how state social, economic, and health policies influence cardiovascular risk, outcomes, and disparities among low-income and minoritized populations.

Mark Duggan is Trione Director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) and The Wayne and Jodi Cooperman Professor of Economics at Stanford University. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering at M.I.T. in 1992 and 1994, respectively, and his Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University in 1999. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. Before arriving to Stanford in 2014, Duggan previously was on the faculty at the University of Chicago (1999-2003), the University of Maryland (2003-2011), and the University of Pennsylvania (2011-2014). He has received teaching and/or advising awards at M.I.T., Harvard, the University of Chicago, the University of Maryland, and Stanford.

Professor Duggan’s research focuses on the health care sector and also on the effects of government expenditure programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid on the behavior of individuals and firms. Some of his more recent research is exploring the effects of privatizing general acute care hospitals on the quality and cost of medical care, the causes and consequences of homelessness along with policies to address it, and policies to improve the pricing of cancer drug treatments, which are 130 percent more expensive in the U.S. than in other industrialized countries. His research has been published in leading academic journals including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics and has been featured in many media outlets including The Economist, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.

Professor Duggan was the 2010 recipient of the ASHEcon Medal, which is awarded every two years by the American Society of Health Economists to the economist aged 40 and under in the U.S. who has made the most significant contributions to the field of health economics. Along with his co-author Fiona Scott Morton, he received the National Institute for Health Care Management’s 2011 Health Care Research Award for their work on Medicare Part D. He was previously a Fellow of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Health, the Social Security Administration, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Duggan served from 2009-10 as the Senior Economist for Health Care Policy at the White House Council of Economic Advisers and has testified about his academic research before the House Ways and Means and Senate Budget Committees.

Rourke O’Brien is a sociologist and social demographer. His research focuses on the causes and consequences of social and economic inequalities with substantive interests in taxation, household finance, and population health. Current projects examine: the interplay between health and intergenerational economic mobility; inequality, demography and the structure of subnational tax systems; and how social context influences financial decision-making. He is coauthor of Taxing the Poor (UC Press) and his research has appeared in academic journals including the American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, and Demography and his policy writing has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post.

Before coming to Yale, Rourke was an assistant professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He also previously served as a Senior Policy Advisor at the U.S. Department of the Treasury and completed a postdoctoral fellowship as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar at Harvard University. Rourke received his B.A. from Harvard University and his Ph.D. in Sociology & Social Policy from Princeton University.

Kosali Simon is a Distinguished Professor, Herman B. Wells Endowed Professor, and Paul O’Neill Chair in the IU O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs. She also serves as the Associate Vice Provost for Health Sciences at IU Bloomington, and the Executive Director of the IU- Research Data Commons.

Simon’s research applies the theories and causal analysis statistical tools of economics to questions of health and health care policy. Her past research has mainly focuses on the impact of health insurance reform on healthcare and health outcomes, especially for marginalized populations. More recent work has also examined the causes and consequences of the opioid crisis and impacts of COVID related policies. She is a member of both the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Social Insurance.

Simon is the current President of the American Society of Health Economists. She has held numerous other leadership roles in her profession, including roles with the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management and the American Economic Association. Currently, she is a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Committee on Unequal Treatment Revisited: The Current State of Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Healthcare and the NASEM Roundtable on Population Health Improvement; and a member of the U.S. Congressional Budget Office Panel of Health Advisors.

Simon is editor for the Journal of Health Economics, co-editor for Journal of Human Resources, and has held editorial positions in several other journals.

Stefanie Ilgenfritz leads a prize-winning team of reporters and editors who cover the hospital, health-insurance, pharmaceutical and medical-device industries, as well as medicine and science. And she oversees The Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything section that explores the nascent trends that will shape our world.