Paul Ginsburg is the Leonard D. Schaeffer Chair in Health Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution. He is also Professor of Health Policy at the Sol Price School of Public Policy, University of Southern California and serves as Director of Public Policy at the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics. He is leading the Schaeffer Initiative on Innovation in Health Policy, which is a joint program of USC and Brookings. From 1995 through the end of 2013 he founded and served as President of the Center for Studying Health System Change (HSC). Initiated with core support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, HSC conducted research to inform policymakers and other audiences about changes in organization, financing and delivery of care and their effects on people. HSC was widely known for the objectivity and technical quality of its research and its success in communicating it to policy makers, industry and the media as well as to the research community. It enjoyed particular respect for its knowledge of developments in communities and health care markets.

Prior to his founding HSC, Ginsburg served as the founding Executive Director of the predecessor to the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC). Widely regarded as highly influential, the Commission developed the Medicare physician payment reform that was enacted by the Congress in 1989. In 2016, Ginsburg was appointed a MedPAC Commissioner. He was a Senior Economist at RAND and served as Deputy Assistant Director at the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Before that, he served on the faculties of Duke and Michigan State Universities. He earned his doctorate in economics from Harvard University.

Ginsburg is a noted speaker and consultant on the changes in the financing and delivery of health care, particularly on the evolution of health care markets. In addition to presentations on the overall direction of change, recent topics have included cost trends and drivers, consumer driven health care, provider payment reform, price transparency, the future of employer-based health insurance, addressing growing provider leverage and competition in health care. As a Senior Adviser to the Bipartisan Policy Center, he has contributed to reports on reducing federal spending on health care (2010), on a strategy to contain health care costs (2013) and on approaches to provider payment reform in Medicare (2014-2015). He has been named to Modern Healthcare’s “100 Most Influential Persons in Health Care” eight times. He received the first annual HSR Impact Award from AcademyHealth. He is a founding member of the National Academy of Social Insurance, a Public Trustee of the American Academy of Ophthalmology, served two elected terms on the Board of AcademyHealth, served on CBO’s Panel of Health Advisors and serves on Health Affairs’ editorial board. In 2015, he was appointed to the HHS National Advisory Council for Health Care Research and Quality.

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