EXPERTS ADVISORY

The University of Michigan has experts who can comment on the House action to pull the health care bill intended to replace the Affordable Care Act.

John Ayanian is the director of the Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation, the Alice Hamilton Professor of Internal Medicine, and professor of public health and public policy. He conducts research on how access to health insurance affects individuals’ access to health care, the quality of care they receive and their health outcomes.

He leads IHPI’s federally approved objective evaluation of the Healthy Michigan Plan, the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. The evaluation recently found that Michigan’s expansion of Medicaid health insurance coverage has boosted the state’s economy and budget, and will continue to do so even as the state assumes more of the cost of caring for the 638,000 Michiganders who have signed up for the program. Read about those findings.

Contact: Via Kara Gavin, 734-764-2220, [email protected]

Mark Fendrick is a professor of internal medicine and health management and policy, and heads the Center for Value-Based Insurance Design. He has proposed new models for private and public health insurance plans that build on his research about the impact of out-of-pocket costs on consumers’ health behaviors. Read about one such proposal.

Contact: Via Kara Gavin, 734-764-2220, [email protected]

Scott Greer, associate professor of health management and policy, is a political scientist. He researches the politics of health policies and recently published research about a scorecard that shows how public health will be impacted under the new administration.

Contact: 734-936-3711, [email protected]

Laura Gultekin, assistant professor of nursing, works with low-resource families through research and clinical practice. She can discuss the huge decline in the numbers of people who have needed free care at clinics before and after the Affordable Care Act.

Contact: 734-647-0193, [email protected]

Richard Hirth, professor and chair of health management and policy, can discuss the economics of health insurance, health care costs and payment system design. Hirth recently talked about the issues at hand: myumi.ch/L18qO and myumi.ch/Lz2mV.

Contact: 734-936-1306, [email protected]

Jeffrey Kullgren, assistant professor of internal medicine, studies how people make decisions about the health care they use and how those decisions are affected by the out-of-pocket costs they face through high-deductible health plans, and the “transparency” tools made available by public and private insurers and nonprofits. He is working with a major private insurer to develop a price-transparency tool that can be used during a patient visit. Read about his most recent research.

Contact: Via Kara Gavin, 734-764-2220, [email protected]

Helen Levy is a research professor at the Institute for Social Research and holds joint appointments at the School of Public Health and Ford School of Public Policy. She is a health economist who studies the causes and consequences of uninsurance, and evaluates the impacts of public health insurance programs.

She also is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and served as a senior economist to the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. She co-wrote a January 2017 article in the New England Journal of Medicine titled “Economic Effects of Medicaid Expansion in Michigan.” Read more about that study.

Contact: [email protected]

Marianne Udow-Phillips is the executive director of the Center for Healthcare Research & Transformation. Before CHRT, she spent more than 20 years in leadership positions at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan and served as director of the Michigan Department of Human Services. Her expertise includes access to health care, as well as health insurance, and payment and financing. CHRT’s recent analyses have focused on the potential impacts of the American Health Care Act in Michigan. Read those reports on: http://www.chrt.org/publication/

Contact: Via Heather Guenther, 734-998-8514, [email protected]