March 25, 2005

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, 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; he is responsible for all actuarial and other financial analyses for the Medicare and Medicaid programs. His 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. He and his staff prepare the national health expenditure account data and projections, produce the hospital input price index and Medicare economic index, and calculate the Medicare Choice capitation rates for managed care plans. Mr. Foster was deputy chief actuary for the Social Security Administration for thirteen years. 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), and "A Stochastic Evaluation of the Short Range Economic Assumptions in the 1994 OASDI Trustees' Report" (Actuarial Study N. 109).

James K. Glassman is a resident fellow at AEI, where he specializes in issues involving economics and financial markets. In addition, he is host and co-founder of TechCentralStation.com, a for-profit website, started in February 2000, which concentrates on matters of technology and public policy. In September 2004, Mr. Glassman launched a new organization, Investors Action, for which he serves as chairman. Investors Action aims to educate America's 90 million investors and represent their interests in the public-policy arena. Mr. Glassman also writes a weekly op-ed column on economic and political topics for the Scripps Howard News Service, and a monthly column on investing for Kiplinger's Personal Finance. His most recent book, The Secret Code of the Superior Investor (Crown, 2002) was named one of the top ten investing books of 2002 by Barrons. Between July 1993 and July 2004, Mr. Glassman wrote an internationally syndicated weekly column on investing for the Washington Post. From 1987 to 1993, he was editor and part-owner of Roll Call, the twice-weekly newspaper that covers Congress. Prior to that, he had a long career in magazine publishing—as president of the Atlantic Monthly, executive vice president of U.S. News & World Report, and publisher of the New Republic. In 1972, he started Figaro, a New Orleans weekly newspaper, which he sold in 1979. He was executive editor of the Washingtonian magazine from 1979 to 1981.

Stephen C. Goss is currently chief actuary at the Social Security Administration. He joined the Office of the Chief Actuary in 1973, where he has worked in areas related to health insurance as well as pension, disability, and survivor protection. Mr. Goss has written articles and actuarial studies on several topics and has made presentations and participated in panel discussions at numerous conferences. He has worked closely with members of the executive branch, members of Congress and their staff, and numerous commissions, as well as with private organizations. Mr. Goss is a member of the Society of Actuaries, the American Academy of Actuaries, the National Academy of Social Insurance, the Social Insurance Committee of the American Academy of Actuaries, and the Social Security Retirement and Disability Income Committee of the Society of Actuaries.

Mark McClellan was sworn in as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services on March 25, 2004, following Senate confirmation by a unanimous voice vote. Previously, beginning in November 2002, Dr. McClellan served as commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. In 2001 and 2002, Dr. McClellan served in the White House as a member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, where he advised on domestic economic issues and was a senior policy director for health care and related economic issues. From 1998 to 1999, he was deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the Treasury Department. Dr. McClellan is on leave from Stanford University, where he was associate professor of economics and of medicine. At Stanford Medical School, he was a practicing internist and director of the Program on Health Outcomes Research. Dr. McClellan was also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a visiting scholar at AEI. He has also served as 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 (HRS), 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.

Len Nichols joined the Center for Studying Health System Change as vice president in 2001 after seven years as a principal research associate at the Urban Institute. He is a health policy expert who has written and published extensively on a variety of topics, including insurance market regulation, the effect of tax policy on health insurance purchase decisions and private insurance options for Medicare. Mr. Nichols has testified before Congressional committees as well as state legislatures. During the first two years of the Clinton Administration, he was the senior adviser for health policy at the Office of Management and Budget, where he managed and coordinated cost and revenue estimation for President Clinton's Health Security Act (HSA) and its congressional successors. From 1991 to 1992, Mr. Nichols was a visiting Public Health Service Fellow at the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research. Prior to that, he was an associate professor and Economics Department chair at Wellesley College, where he taught from 1980 to 1991. On April 1, 2005, Mr. Nichols will become the director of the Health Policy Program at the New America Foundation, a non-partisan think tank devoted to finding practical solutions to our nation's most pressing problems.

Robert D. Reischauer is the president of the Urban Institute. Previously, he was a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the director of the Congressional Budget Office, where he also served as a special assistant to the director, an assistant director for human resources and community development, and deputy director. From 1981 to 1986, Mr. Reischauer was the senior vice president of the Urban Institute. He is a member of the Harvard Corporation and serves on the boards of several educational and nonprofit organizations. Mr. Reischauer is the vice chair of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission and was the chair of the National Academy of Social Insurance's project, "Restructuring Medicare for the Long Term." He frequently contributes to the opinion pages of the nation's major newspapers, comments on public policy developments on radio and television, and testifies before congressional committees.

Kent Smetters is an associate professor (with tenure) at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He worked for the U.S. Congress from 1995 to 1998 before coming to the University in Pennsylvania in 1998 as an assistant professor. Mr. Smetters was the Kaiser Visiting Professor of Economics at the Stanford Economics Department during the 2000–01 academic year. He was appointed deputy assistant secretary for economic policy of the U.S. Treasury on July 3, 2001, where he served until August 30, 2002. Mr. Smetters remains active in Washington, D.C., and recently served as a member of the Blue Ribbon Panel on Dynamic Scoring for the Joint Committee on Taxation of the U.S. Congress.

Eugene Steuerle is a senior fellow at The Urban Institute and co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. Mr. Steuerle writes a column for Tax Notes and is the author or editor of eleven books, more than 150 reports and articles, more than fifty congressional testimonies or reports, and more than 600 columns. His latest book is Contemporary U.S. Tax Policy [Urban Institute Press, 2004]. He serves on the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics and on advisory panels or boards for the Congressional Budget Office, the Government Accountability Office, and others. Previous positions he has held include president of the National Tax Association (2001-2002), chair of the 1999 Technical Panel advising Social Security on its methods and assumptions, president of the National Economists Club Educational Foundation, deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury for tax analysis (1987-1989), and resident fellow at AEI. Between 1984 and 1986, he served as economic coordinator and original organizer of the Treasury's tax reform effort.

Mark J. Warshawsky was sworn in as assistant secretary for economic policy at the Treasury Department on March 18, 2004. As assistant secretary, he advises the secretary and deputy secretary of the Treasury on all aspects of economic policy. His office is responsible for reporting on current and prospective macro- and microeconomic developments and assisting in the determination of appropriate economic policies. Mr. Warshawsky was previously the deputy assistant secretary for economic policy, microeconomic analysis, at the Treasury Department, a position he held since January 2002. He directed research to assist in the formulation and articulation of public policies and positions of the Treasury Department and the administration on a wide range of economic issues. These issues included terror risk insurance, financial reporting, pensions, health spending, retirement income security, long-term care, and various aspects of specific industries and sectors of the economy. He also represented the Treasury secretary, managing trustee of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds, in preparation of the Trustees' Reports. Before coming to Treasury, Mr. Warshawsky was director of research at the TIAA-CREF Institute. Before that, he supervised a study of under-funded defined benefit plans for the IRS (Employee Plans Division) for which work he received the Assistant Commissioner's Award. Prior to that, Mr. Warshawsky was a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Board (Capital Markets Section) where he was responsible for analysis of the financial risk exposure of the corporate nonfinancial sector. He has organized four research conferences, and has authored three books and over fifty professional articles.
Christian Weller is a senior economist at the Center for American Progress, where he specializes in Social Security and retirement income, macroeconomics, the Federal Reserve, and international finance. Prior to joining American Progress, he was on the research staff at the Economic Policy Institute, where he remains a research associate. Mr. Weller has also worked at the Center for European Integration Studies at the University of Bonn, Germany, in the Department of Public Policy of the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C., and in universal banking in Germany, Belgium and Poland. His publications appear in publications ranging from the Cambridge Journal of Economics and the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management to the Atlanta Journal Constitution and USA Today. Mr. Weller is often cited in the press, and he has been a frequent guest on news programs on CNN, Fox News, and NBC, among others.

Gail Wilensky is a senior fellow at Project HOPE, an international health education foundation, where she analyzes and develops policies relating to health care reform and to ongoing changes in the health care environment. From 1990 to 1992, she was administrator of the Health Care Financing Administration, overseeing the Medicare and Medicaid programs. She also served as deputy assistant to President George H. W. Bush for policy development, advising him on health and welfare issues from 1992 to 1993. From 1997 to 2001, she chaired the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, and from 1995 to 1997, she chaired the Physician Payment Review Commission. From 2001 to 2003, she co-chaired the President's Task Force to Improve Health Care Delivery for Our Nation's Veterans, which covered health care for both veterans and military retirees. Ms. Wilensky testifies frequently before congressional committees, acts as an adviser to members of Congress and other elected officials, and speaks nationally and internationally before professional, business and consumer groups.

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