Affiliated faculty Joseph Newhouse spoke at Stanford Health Policy about health care spending and Medicare Part D. Chair of the Committee on Higher Degrees in Health Policy at Harvard, Newhouse has decades of experience in the field and numerous awards and appointments for his research in health care.

"Joe is one of the nation's top health economists,"  Department of Health Research Policy (HRP) professor and Stanford Health Policy associate faculty Laurence Baker said. "He has done a lot of influential work over the years so it's always exciting to have someone like him around campus."

HRP co-hosted Newhouse's talk with Stanford Health Policy (CHP/PCOR).

The John D. MacArthur Professor Health Policy and Management at Harvard University, Newhouse also directs the Division of Health Policy Research. Newhouse is the founding editor for the Journal of Health Economics, and he sits on the editorial board for the New England Journal of Medicine.

Besides his dozens of awards and honors, Newhouse has published extensively on the health care system. His current research interests are on health care markets; estimating the effects of selection in health insurance; the role of risk in providing health care; and the effects these varying degrees of risk have in managed health care organizations' utilization, costs, outcomes and selection behavior.

In the February issue of Health Affairs, Newhouse co-authored a study looking at prescription drug usage among two groups of Medicare beneficiaries: individual Part D group with little or no coverage and employer group with no coverage gap.  The article, "The effects of the coverage gap on drug spending: a closer look at Medicare Part D," looked at how many of the beneficiaries reached the so-called Medicare doughnut hole and how their prescription drug use rate changed once the catastrophic coverage level was reached.

Newhouse's April 24^th talk in the CHP/PCOR conference room touched on issues like these surrounding Medicare D as well as health care spending. His speech was open to the Stanford community.