Newhouse, Joseph P.

Joseph P. Newhouse is a preeminent health economist. He has published extensively in the fields of health economics, health policy, and health services research. He also has trained many health economists.

Born in 1942 in Waterloo, Iowa, Newhouse earned a bachelor's degree and doctoral degree in economics from Harvard University. In 1963–1964, he was a Fulbright Scholar at the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe University at Frankfurt am Main in the Federal Republic of Germany.

Since the early 1970s, Newhouse has been a leading researcher, public servant, and scholar in health economics and health policy. He conceived and carried out significant, and in some cases unique, research projects; his research spans such diverse areas as health insurance incentives, healthcare payment systems, healthcare costs, health technology, risk adjustment, medical malpractice, and the impact of poor health habits. While at the RAND Corporation (1968–1988), he markedly expanded its health research and health policy expertise. Most notable was the RAND Health Insurance Experiment (HIE), one of the largest social science experiments in U.S. history. In leading the HIE, Newhouse oversaw an unprecedented research effort for more than 15 years. HIE papers, reports, and the definitive HIE summary Free for All? form the canonical basis for understanding healthcare demand and the response to insurance incentives, healthcare quality, and health outcomes in America.

Newhouse left the RAND Corporation and became a faculty member at Harvard University in 1988. As of 2007, he holds the ranks of John D. MacArthur Professor of Health Policy and Management (jointly in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Public Health, and Kennedy School of Government); Director, Division of Health Policy Research and Education; and Director, Interfaculty Initiative on Health Policy. He created a doctoral program in health policy that exemplifies productive, collegial collaboration across the major schools at Harvard and that has trained more than 100 doctoral graduates now serving on university faculties, in public health agencies, and major health foundations.

Since 1966, Newhouse has authored or coau-thored 350 publications (books, reports, and peer-reviewed journal articles). In 1981, Newhouse founded the Journal of Health Economics, an important economics journal. He continues to lead the editorial board, having edited more than 1,000 papers in the intervening years.

Newhouse has an extensive public service record. He has served as chair of the Prospective Payment Assessment Commission (ProPAC), commissioner of the Physician Payment Review Commission (PPRC), and vice chair of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC). In 1977, he was elected to the national Institute of Medicine (IOM) and served two terms on the IOM governing council.

Newhouse has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the first David N. Kershaw [Page 849]Award honoring persons under 40 years of age for distinguished contributions to public policy analysis and management (1983), the Baxter Health Services Research Prize and the Administrator's Citation from the U.S. Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) (both in 1988), and the Distinguished Investigator Award from the professional association AcademyHealth (1992). He is a past president of the Association for Health Services Research (now AcademyHealth) and the International Health Economics Association, and he was the inaugural president of the American Society of Health Economics. He was elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1995) and fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2002).

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