Austin is the creator, co-manager, and a primary author of The Incidental Economist. He is a health economist with an educational background in physics and engineering. After receiving his PhD in statistical and applied mathematics he spent four years at a research and consulting firm conducting policy evaluations for federal health agencies. Austin now has appointments with the Department of Psychiatry at Boston University’s School of Medicine, the Department of Health Policy and Management at Boston University’s School of Public Health and Health Care Financing & Economics (HCFE) at the Boston VA Healthcare System, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Since 1999, he has studied economic issues pertaining U.S. health care policy with a recent but not exclusive focus on Medicare and the uninsured. Lately, he has devoted more attention to comparative effectiveness studies based on observational data.
Austin has authored numerous peer-reviewed, scholarly publications, many relevant to health care financing, economics, and policy. His peer-reviewed papers have appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, Milbank Quarterly, Health Care Financing Review, Health Affairs, Health Economics, International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics, Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, among other journals (citations here). He has contributed many columns to Kaiser Health News, commentary for the New York Times’ Room for Debate forum, posts for the JAMA Forum and the AcademyHealth blog, and has appeared on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition.
Austin’s interests include economics and health care, of course, but also politics, personal finance, and the amusements of family life. Outside of his principal work duties, he manages his household’s finances, plays the trumpet, is CFO of a small business, and looks after his two children.
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For speaking inquiries, contact Jo at Speakers on Healthcare: jo@speakersonhealthcare.com or 503-345-9164 ext 1.
(The views expressed in Austin’s posts are his own and do not necessarily reflect the positions of the Department of Veterans Affairs or Boston University.)
