Health-care Research Recognized
CAS Economics Professor Randall Ellis was honored for a 2007 Journal of Health Economics article
Randall P. Ellis, a College of Arts and Sciences professor of economics, was among the recipients of the National Institute for Health Care Management Foundation’s 14th annual Health Care Research Award. Ellis and coauthor Thomas G. McGuire, a former CAS professor of economics, shared the award with two others. They received the $10,000 prize in Washington, D.C., on June 16.
Ellis and McGuire were recognized for their 2007 Journal of Health Economics article “Predictability and Predictiveness in Health Care Spending.”
A BU faculty member since 1981, Ellis is a health economist who is working on how incentives change both consumer and provider behavior. He teaches health economics at the undergraduate, master’s, and Ph.D. levels, covering topics such as health-care reform, health in developing countries, and the comparison of different health-care markets.
McGuire, a BU professor of economics until 2001, is a professor of health economics at Harvard Medical School.
“Tom is a terrific coauthor, full of great ideas, focusing on the big picture, and yet paying great attention to the details, which is what a first-rate paper needs,” says Ellis.
“Predictability and Predictiveness” deals with the problem of health plans sometimes profiting more by avoiding or dismissing high-cost ill patients than by caring for them. This problem occurs in the United States and in many other countries.
Ellis says that McGuire and other economists came up with the idea that health plans compete by generously offering services, which attract the healthy, and providing poorer quality services to the sick and high-cost consumers.
“The contribution of our ‘Predictability and Predictiveness’ paper is that we came up with an empirically driven method of identifying which services will be oversupplied and which will be undersupplied,” Ellis says. “They are services that are both predictable — consumers can anticipate using them — and predictive of future health costs.”
Ellis says he has no plans yet for the prize money. “Simply the honor and the chance to work with McGuire are more valuable than the money,” he says.
The other honorees were Richard G. Frank of Harvard Medical School and Richard J. Zeckhauser of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, who wrote “Custom-Made Versus Ready to Wear Treatments: Behavioral Propensities in Physicians’ Choices,” which also appeared in the Journal of Health Economics.
Davide Nardi can be reached at dnardi@bu.edu.
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