Speaker: Kathy Swartz, PhD
Date: February 19, 2013
Time: 4:00 – 5:30 pm
Place: BU School of Management, 595 Commonwealth Ave, Room 210

The Boston University Health Policy Institute is pleased to announce the sixth seminar in its 2012 – 2013 Health Policy and Management Seminar Series.

Professor Kathy Swartz will present "Implementation of the Affordable Care Act: Issues and Lessons from the Netherlands and Switzerland" on Tuesday, February 19, 2013, 4:00 – 5:30 pm, in SMG Room 210,

Abstract

To date, twenty-five states and the District of Columbia have announced plans to implement their own health insurance exchanges or partner with the federal government to create partnership exchanges. The issues with implementation confronting each state include: how to encourage competition among insurers in the exchanges, how the exchanges will interact with each state's existing insurance markets, how to risk-adjust payments to insurers that participate in the exchanges and enroll people likely to have high medical expenses, and how to minimize gaps in coverage and transitions between Medicaid and subsidized insurance plans in the exchanges when people have family size or income changes. I discuss the difficulties surrounding each of these decisions and the pros and cons of options for addressing each. I also discuss some lessons from the experiences of the Netherlands and Switzerland, who had respective health reforms in 2006 and 1996, that created health insurance markets with private health insurance; the Dutch and Swiss reforms have some similarities to the US exchanges.

Katherine Swartz is a professor of health economics and policy at the Harvard School of Public Health. Her research interests for the past 30 years have focused on people without health insurance, efforts to increase access to health care coverage, and how we might pay for expanded coverage. She is currently involved in two projects related to how states are implementing the Affordable Care Act. Her more recent research also has expanded to focusing on policy issues related to the elderly and analyzing how OECD countries have been revamping their approaches to providing long-term care and health insurance. She was the President of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) in 2009, and is a member of the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Social Insurance. She also was a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation and edited the health economics and policy journal Inquiry between 1996 and 200, and is the 1991 recipient of APPAM's David Kershaw Award for research done before the age of 40 that has significantly impacted public policy.

http://www.bu.edu/hpi/seminar-series/current/