Ellen R. Meara, PhD, is an associate professor of health care policy, with a specialty in economics, in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. Her current research focuses on three areas: welfare reform and substance abuse, racial and educational disparities in mortality and health over time, and the nature and determinants of medical spending over time. Dr. Meara is the recipient of a career development award from the National Institute of Drug Abuse. In this research, she is studying the impact of welfare reform and related program changes on the employment, public program participation, treatment, and health outcomes of low-income individuals with substance use, abuse, and dependence issues.

In a second related area of research, Dr. Meara is examining educational and racial disparities in health and mortality over time. She has studied how the implementation of Medicare affects selected health outcomes and health disparities among the elderly. In another project, she is measuring educational disparities in mortality over time and whether trends in educational disparities in mortality relate to specific causes of death.

In a third area of work, Dr. Meara has studied trends in medical spending in the United States from the 1950s until the present. Dr. Meara and colleagues have argued that Medicare’s cost-containment strategies in the 1980s and 1990s were responsible for marked declines in the rate of medical spending growth. In other spending-related work, Dr. Meara has written on the topic of how policymakers should think about the optimal level of spending for the treatment of substance abuse.

Dr. Meara received her BA in mathematical methods in the social sciences and political science from Northwestern University and her PhD in economics from Harvard University. She is a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and from 2001 to 2002 she was an affiliated faculty member at the Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago.