A. Bowen Garrett, PhD, is a senior expert and chief economist at McKinsey’s Center for US Health System Reform and an affiliated scholar at the Urban Institute. He has written extensively on health reform and health policy topics, combining rigorous empirical methods and economic thinking with an understanding of the policy landscape to better inform policymaking. He brings economic expertise to a range of reform center initiatives. He is also a member of McKinsey’s MPACT healthcare simulation modeling team. MPACT is an innovative platform for modeling the impact of health insurance coverage reforms on individuals and employers. Combining academic research with McKinsey proprietary insights, MPACT estimates the effects of reforms under multiple sets of behavioral assumptions and is unique in estimating reform impacts down to the county level.
Before joining McKinsey in November 2010, Dr. Garrett was a senior research associate at the Urban Institute’s Health Policy Center, where he led the development of the Health Insurance Policy Simulation Model (HIPSM). Using HIPSM, he led teams conducting studies of the likely effects of alternative reform proposals for the Obama administration, the state of New York, and private foundations. He was also co-principal investigator of Urban Institute’s participation in the State Coverage Initiative’s Reinsurance Institute. During his tenure at the Urban Institute he wrote numerous research articles and reports on employer-sponsored insurance, Medicaid and the uninsured, and Medicare’s prospective payment systems.
Dr. Garrett is a frequent writer and speaker. His work has been published in Health Affairs, Health Services Research, Inquiry, the Journal of Public Policy Analysis and Management, and Medical Care. His work has been cited or featured in the Economist, National Public Radio, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the White House Blog. With co-authors, the paper “Age Rating Under Comprehensive Health Reform” was recognized by the Urban Institute President’s Outstanding Research Publication Award for Policy Research, and the paper “The Cost of Failure to Enact Health Reform: Implications for States” received an honorable mention for Outstanding Research Publication for Public Communication.
Dr. Garrett is a research associate in the Info-Metrics Institute at American University and has taught quantitative methods and economic statistics at Georgetown University. He was a post-doctoral research fellow in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Scholars in Health Policy Research Program at the University of California, Berkeley, and received his PhD in economics from Columbia University in 1996.