Daniel Polsky, Ph.D., M.P.P
- Research Associate Professor of Medicine, Division of General Internal Medicine
- Associate Professor of Health Care Systems, Wharton School
- Senior Fellow, Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics
Dr. Polsky received a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania in May 1996 and a Master of Public Policy from the University of Michigan in 1989. His research areas include health insurance and financial access to health care, economic evaluation of medical and behavioral health interventions, and the health care workforce. He is currently the principal investigator of 3 R01s. One, sponsored by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), addresses statistical methods for cost research in alcohol studies; the second, from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, is a comprehensive economic analysis of buprenorphine/naloxone-facilitated rehabilitation for opioid dependent adolescents/young adults; and the third, from the National Institute on Aging, examines how access to Medicare at 65 for the previously uninsured has a different effect on health service use and health outcomes compared to the previously insured. In addition, he has run Robert Wood Johnson funded projects studying physician workforce responses to managed care, the quality of care in mental health treatment, the degree of risk selection in employer-sponsored health insurance, and health plan choices for employees. The link between all of these projects is Dr. Polsky’s commitment to establishing causal relationships between either medical or health system interventions and health outcomes using randomized trials and national health surveys such as National Health Interview Survey, the Health and Retirement Study, the Community Tracking Survey. Dr. Polsky’s work appears in the Journal of Health Economics, Health Economics, Health Services Research, and Medical Care. Dr. Polsky is a member of the Academy of Health, the International Health Economics Association, and the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research.