Economist Amitabh Chandra is a leading authority on health economics, on productivity and innovation in healthcare, and on market-driven solutions in healthcare policy. Amitabh has a plan for comprehensive healthcare reform that insures the uninsured, improves quality of care, and eliminates the perverse incentives that currently drive up costs. Amitabh Chandra is a professor of public policy and Director of Health Policy Research at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

Amitabh’s research shows that market forces do apply in healthcare, contrary to conventional wisdom, but they need to be more intelligently applied. Amitabh proposes increasing competition, giving healthcare consumers greater choices and better information, and using effective measures for patient outcomes, among other changes.

The main driver of rising healthcare costs is new technologies that cost a lot and deliver little or no improvements in patient outcomes. Amitabh would bring science into our coverage and pay for only those technologies that demonstrate positive results. At least as important for good healthcare, he says, is education — a good education has a demonstrably greater impact on healthcare outcomes than healthcare spending itself.

Chandra’s strategy for reforming healthcare insures everyone. It ends subsidies for employer-based coverage, which prevents job mobility and business innovation. His plan provides premium supports to those who need it and expands the choices beyond the limits imposed by Medicaid and the employer-based system. It stops using premiums from healthy people to pay for sick people’s coverage. And it encourages long-term coverage; current one-year insurance is prepaid healthcare for one year, not health insurance, he argues.

Amitabh is a co-founder of HealthEngine, a healthcare technology company that allows consumers to shop for healthcare the way they shop for virtually everything else and allows physicians to differentiate themselves in a dynamic marketplace.

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