Michael E. Chernew, Ph.D.
Professor, Department of Health Management and Policy, Department of Economics, and Department of Internal Medicine
University of Michigan School of Public Health
Co-Director, RWJ Scholars Program in Health Policy Research

December 16, 2005
12:00 - 1:30 PM
Colonial Penn Center Auditorium

Paper

Biosketch:
Michael Chernew is Professor at the University of Michigan in the departments of Health Management and Policy, Internal Medicine, and Economics. He received a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University, where his training focused on areas of applied microeconomics and econometrics. Dr. Chernew is Co-Editor of the American Journal of Managed Care and Co-Director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation?s Scholars in Health Policy Research program at the University of Michigan. Dr. Chernew is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and he is on the Editorial Boards of Health Services Research, Health Affairs, and Medical Care Research and Review.

In 2000 and 2004, he served on a technical advisory panel for the Health Care Financing Administration that reviewed the assumptions used by the Medicare actuaries to assess the financial status of the Medicare trust funds. On the panel Dr. Chernew focused on the methodology used to project trends in long term health care cost growth. Other research has examined determinants of patient choice of hospital and the impact of health plan performance measures on employee and employer selection of health plans. In 1998, he was awarded the John D. Thompson Prize for Young investigators by the Association of University Programs in Public Health. In 1999, he received the Alice S. Hersh, Young Investigator Award from the Association of Health Services Research. Both of these awards recognize overall contribution to the field of health services research. Dr. Chernew's research focuses on assessing the impact of managed care on the health care marketplace, with an emphasis on examining the impact of managed care on health care cost growth and on the use of medical technology.

Abstract:
We assess the aggregate impact of Medicare HMO enrollment on FFS Medicare expenditure and utilization and decompose it into spillover and selection effects. Our basic approach is to regress spending by FFS Medicare beneficiaries on the share of Medicare beneficiaries in their county enrolled HMO plans. The aggregate effect is estimated using a model with only basic demographics as covariates, whereas the spillover effect is estimated using a model with a much larger set, including extensive controls for health status.