Bio: Rhema Vaithianathan, Ph.D., a 2007-08 Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellow in Health Care Policy and Practice, is a health economist and senior lecturer at the University of Auckland. Previously, she was a research fellow at Australian National University, economic consultant to the New Zealand Health Funding Authority, and policy analyst at the New Zealand Treasury. Her interests lie in health care financing systems and policy on the international level. Vaithianathan's research on topics including adverse selection , rank dependent utility analysis, cost-sharing, and imperfect competition in health insurance markets, has been published in the Journal of Health Economics, Journal of Health Services Research and Policy, Economic Theory, and Australian Economic Review. She was awarded the University of Auckland's Business School Research Excellence Award and Prize for Best Doctoral Dissertation in Business/Economics. She earned both her doctorate in economics and master's of commerce from the University of Auckland.
Placement: Harvard University
Mentors: Michael Chernew, Ph.D.
Project: Insurance Coverage and Cost Growth
Description: Vaithianathan's project had three objectives: (1) to determine the relationship between insurance coverage and annual real change in health care expenditure; (2) to estimate the effect of expanding coverage on the annual rate of health care cost growth; and (3) to predict the difference in cost growth according to whether the uninsured are publicly or privately covered. She analyzed data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) from 1996 to 2005.