Joseph P. Newhouse, PhD, is the John D. MacArthur Professor of Health Policy and Management at Harvard University, director of the Division of Health Policy Research and Education, chair of the Committee on Higher Degrees in Health Policy, and director of the Interfaculty Initiative in Health Policy. He is a member of the faculties of the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Public Health, and Faculty of Arts and Sciences, as well as a faculty research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He received BA and PhD degrees in economics from Harvard University. Following his bachelor’s degree, he was a Fulbright scholar in Germany. Dr. Newhouse spent the first 20 years of his career at RAND, where he designed and directed the RAND Health Insurance Experiment, which studied the consequences of different ways of financing medical services. From 1981 to 1985, he was head of the RAND Economics Department.

In 1981 Dr. Newhouse became the founding editor of the Journal of Health Economics, which he continues to edit. He is a current member of the editorial board of the New England Journal of Medicine and a past member of the editorial board of the Journal of Economic Perspectives. He has been elected to the Institute of Medicine and has served two terms on its governing council. He has also been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is a past president of the Association for Health Services Research (now AcademyHealth) and of the International Health Economics Association and was the inaugural president of the American Society of Health Economists. He has served as vice chair of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, which reviews Medicare payment policy and makes recommendations to Congress. This commission resulted from the 1997 merger of two predecessor commissions, the Prospective Payment Assessment Commission and the Physician Payment Review Commission. Dr. Newhouse chaired the former commission and served as a commissioner on the latter. He also served as a regent of the National Library of Medicine from 1999 to 2003. He is among the 250 most-cited authors in the fields of economics and business, using citations to articles published between 1981 and 1999. He is a member of the boards of directors of Aetna, Abt Associates, and the National Committee for Quality Assurance.

Dr. Newhouse was the first recipient of the David N. Kershaw Award and Prize of the Association for Public Policy and Management in 1983, which honors persons under 40 who have made a distinguished contribution to the field of public policy analysis and management. In 1988 he received the Baxter Health Services Research Prize for an unusually significant contribution to the improved medical care of the public through innovative health services research, as well as the Administrator’s Citation from the Health Care Financing Administration. He and his coauthors received the Article-of-the-Year Award for 1989 and 2006 from AcademyHealth and in 2006 from ISPOR, and in 1992 he received the Association’s Distinguished Investigator Award. In 1995 he received the Hans Sigrist Foundation Prize for distinguished scientific achievement, as well as the American Risk and Insurance Association’s Elizur Wright Award for a contribution to the risk management and insurance literature for Free for All?. In 1997 he gave the Walras-Pareto Lectures in Lausanne, Switzerland. In 2000 Dr. Newhouse and his coauthors received the first Zvi Griliches award for Are Medical Prices Declining?, and he gave the Chung Hua Lectures in Taipei. In 2001 he and his coauthors won the Kenneth J. Arrow Award for How Does Managed Care Do It?; in 2003 he won the Paul A. Samuelson Certificate of Excellence from TIAA-CREF for Pricing the Priceless.