MBL Friday Evening Lecture Series: “Expanding Health Insurance: What Does It Do and What Does That Mean?” Amy Finkelstein, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Lectures are open to the public for in-person and virtual attendance. No registration required for in-person attendance.
Doors open at 7:30 PM, lectures start at 8 PM.

Expanding health insurance has been a major policy focus in the U.S. from the Truman era to Obamacare. But what does expanding health insurance actually do for those who receive it, and how should future administrations prioritize further expansions relative to other policy goals, such as basic income support? This presentation will use the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment – a landmark randomized controlled trial of the impact of covering low-income uninsured adults with insurance – to present some surprising findings on what health insurance does – and does not – do, and how such results may challenge our thinking about different policy options going forward.

Amy Finkelstein is the John & Jennie S. MacDonald Professor of Economics at MIT. Finkelstein’s areas of specialization are public finance and health economics. She has received numerous awards for her research, including a MacArthur Foundation ‘Genius’ Fellowship (2018) and the John Bates Clark Medal (2012), given annually to the economist under the age of 40 who has made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge. She has also received awards for graduate student teaching and graduate student advising at MIT.

She is the co-founder and co-Scientific Director of J-PAL North America, a research center at MIT that encourages and facilitates randomized evaluations of important domestic policy issues, the founding Editor of American Economic Review: Insights, and the co-Director of the Economics of Health Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine. She also is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Econometric Society.

The author of numerous peer-reviewed papers, she is co-author (with Liran Einav) of We’ve Got You Covered: Rebooting American Health Care (Portfolio, 2023) and co-author (with Ray Fisman and Liran Einav) of Risky Business: Why Insurance Markets Fail and What To Do About It (Yale University Press, 2023).

She received her PhD in Economics from MIT in 2001, an M.Phil in Economics from Oxford in 1997 where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, and an A.B. in Government summa cum laude from Harvard in 1995. Prior to joining the MIT faculty in 2005, she was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. She is a proud alumna of the Woods Hole Children’s School of Science.