Speaker Biographies

Joseph Antos is the Wilson H. Taylor Scholar in Health Care and Retirement Policy at AEI and an adjunct professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Public Health. Prior to coming to AEI, Mr. Antos served as assistant director for health and human resources at the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the division within the CBO that provides Congress with analyses of proposed changes to federal programs and policies in areas such as health, income security, education, employment, and housing. Mr. Antos was the director of the Office of Research and Demonstrations and deputy director of the Office of the Actuary at the Health Care Financing Administration. He served as deputy chief of staff and the principal deputy assistant secretary for management and budget at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Richard Foster is chief actuary for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Mr. Foster is responsible for all actuarial and other financial analyses for the Medicare and Medicaid programs. This work involves both the evaluation of the financial status of the programs under present law and the estimation of the financial effects of legislative proposals. In addition, Mr. Foster and the staff of the Office of the Actuary prepare the widely used national health expenditure account data and projections; produce the hospital input price index, Medicare Economic Index, and other price indexes used to update Medicare payments to providers; and calculate the Medicare Advantage payment benchmarks for private health plans that contract with Medicare. Finally, the Office of the Actuary reviews the actuarial bid submissions for all Medicare Advantage and Part D plans. Mr. Foster became chief actuary in February 1995. Prior to this position, he served as deputy chief actuary for the Social Security Administration for thirteen years. He is a fellow of the Society of Actuaries (1980) and a member of the American Academy of Actuaries, American Statistical Association, American Economic Association, National Academy of Social Insurance, and Senior Executives Association. He has written numerous articles and reports on Medicare and Social Security issues, including "Level of OASDI Trust Fund Assets Needed To Compensate for Adverse Contingencies" in Transactions of the Society of Actuaries (1993), "A Stochastic Evaluation of the Short Range Economic Assumptions in the 1994 OASDI Trustees Report" (Actuarial Study No. 109), and "Trends in Medicare Expenditures and Financial Status, 1966–2000" in the Health Care Financing Review.

Robert B. Helms is a resident scholar in health policy studies at AEI. He has written and lectured extensively on health policy, health economics, and pharmaceutical economic issues. Mr. Helms currently participates in the Consensus Group, an informal task force that is developing market-oriented health reform concepts. He is also serving terms on the National Advisory Council for Healthcare Research and Quality of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (2005–2007) and on the Department of Health and Human Services’ Medicaid Commission (2005–2006). Mr. Helms is the editor of several AEI publications on health policy, including American Health Policy: Critical Issues for Reform; Health Policy Reform: Competition and Controls; Competitive Strategies in the Pharmaceutical Industry; and Medicare in the 21st Century: Seeking Fair and Efficient Reform. He has also written on the history of Medicare, the tax treatment of health insurance, and international comparisons of health systems. From 1981 to 1989, he served as assistant secretary for planning and evaluation and deputy assistant secretary for health policy in the Department of Health and Human Services.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin is the director of the Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies and the Paul A. Volcker Chair in International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. He most recently served as the sixth director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), where he was appointed for a four-year term beginning February 4, 2003. Mr. Holtz-Eakin previously served for eighteen months as chief economist for the President's Council of Economic Advisers, where he also served as senior staff economist in 1989 and 1990. Prior to that, Mr. Holtz-Eakin was the CBO's representative on the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board. Mr. Holtz-Eakin previously served as a trustee professor of economics at the Maxwell School, Syracuse University. At the Maxwell School, he served as chairman of the Department of Economics and associate director of the Center for Policy Research. He also has served as editor of the National Tax Journal, associate editor of the Journal of Human Resources, and as a member of the editorial board of Public Budgeting & Finance, Economics and Politics, Journal of Sports Economics, Regional Science and Urban Economics, and Public Works Management and Policy. Mr. Holtz-Eakin has a longstanding and broad interest in the economics of public policy. He has studied the role of federal taxes in home ownership, the contribution of inventories to the business cycle, and a wide variety of topics in state and local government finance. Recently, his research has centered on the economics of fundamental tax reform; productivity effects of public infrastructure; income mobility in the United States; and the role of families, capital markets, health insurance, and tax policy in the start-up and survival of entrepreneurial ventures.

Dr. Mark McClellan, following Senate confirmation by unanimous voice vote, was sworn in as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services on March 25, 2004. Dr. McClellan previously served as commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration beginning in November 2002. During 2001 and 2002, Dr. McClellan served in the White House as a member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, where he advised the president on domestic economic issues and was a senior policy director for health care and related economic issues. From 1998–1999, he was deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy, where he supervised economic analysis and policy development on a wide range of domestic policy issues. Dr. McClellan is on leave from Stanford University, where he was associate professor of economics and associate professor of medicine at Stanford Medical School. At Stanford Medical School, Dr. McClellan was a practicing internist and director of the Program on Health Outcomes Research. He was also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a visiting scholar at AEI. Additionally, he was a member of the National Cancer Policy Board of the National Academy of Sciences, associate editor of the Journal of Health Economics, and co-principal investigator of the Health and Retirement Study, a longitudinal study of the health and economic well-being of older Americans. Dr. McClellan’s research studies have addressed measuring and improving the quality of health care, the economic and policy factors influencing medical treatment decisions and health outcomes, estimating the effects of medical treatments, technological change in health care and its consequences for health and medical expenditures, and the relationship between health and economic well-being. He has twice received the Arrow Award for Outstanding Research in Health Economics, and he is a member of the Institute of Medicine.

John L. Palmer is currently a professor at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School and a public trustee for the Medicare and Social Security programs. From 1988–2003 he was dean of the Maxwell School and professor of economics and public administration. He previously held several different positions in Washington, D.C., including senior fellow of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, and assistant secretary for planning and evaluation of the Department of Health and Human Services. Professor Palmer’s publications include thirteen books and numerous professional and popular articles on a wide range of topics related to economic, budgetary, and social policy concerns. He has testified before Congress many times and has been a consultant to various government agencies, private foundations, and universities. He has also served as an officer of several national professional associations and as a member of the visiting committee of the Brookings Institution and various committees of the National Research Council. He is a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and past president of the National Academy of Social Insurance.

Thomas Saving is the director of the Private Enterprise Research Center, a University Distinguished Professor of Economics, and the Jeff Montgomery Professor of Economics at Texas A&M University. Mr. Saving served on the faculty at the University of Washington at Seattle and Michigan State University before joining Texas A&M in 1968. Mr. Saving’s research has covered the areas of antitrust economics, monetary economics, and health economics. He has been a referee or a member of the editorial boards of many major U.S. economics journals and is currently a coeditor of Economic Inquiry. His current research emphasis is on the benefit of markets in solving the pressing issues in health care and Social Security. He is the coeditor of Medicare Reform: Issues and Answers (University of Chicago Press, 1999) and the coauthor of The Economics of Medicare Reform (W.E. Upjohn Institute, 2000). In addition, he has published many articles in professional journals and is the author of two influential books on monetary theory. Mr. Saving was previously president of the Western Economics Association, the Southern Economics Association, and the Association of Private Enterprise Education. In 2000, President Clinton appointed Mr. Saving as a public trustee of the Social Security and Medicare Trust Funds. On May 2, 2001, President George W. Bush named Mr. Saving to the bipartisan President’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security. On April 19, 2006, President Bush appointed Mr. Saving for a second term as a public trustee of the Social Security and Medicare Trust Funds.

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