Dr. Newhouse is the John D. MacArthur Professor of Health Policy and Management at Harvard University, Director of the Division of Health Policy Research and Education, chair of the Committee on Higher Degrees in Health Policy, and Director of the Interfaculty Initiative in Health Policy.  He is a member of the faculties of the John F. Kennedy School of Government, the Harvard Medical School, the Harvard School of Public Health, and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, as well as a Faculty Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He received B.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Economics from Harvard University. Following his Bachelors degree, he was a Fulbright Scholar in Germany. Dr. Newhouse spent the first twenty years of his career at RAND, where he designed and directed the RAND Health Insurance Experiment, which studied the consequences of different ways of financing medical services.  From 1981 to 1985 he was Head of the RAND Economics Department.

In 1981 he became the founding editor of the Journal of Health Economics. He is a current member of the editorial board of the New England Journal of Medicine and a past member of the editorial board of the Journal of Economic Perspectives. He was elected to the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in 1977 and has served two terms on its governing Council; in 2009 he won the Adam Yarmolinsky Award for meritorious service to the IOM. He has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is a past President of the Association for Health Services Research (AHSR), now AcademyHealth, and of the International Health Economics Association and was the inaugural President of the American Society of Health Economists. He is a member of the CBO Board of Health Advisers and the Comptroller General’s Advisory Committee. He has served as the vice-chair of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, which reviews Medicare payment policy and makes recommendations to the Congress.  This Commission resulted from the 1997 merger of two predecessor commissions, the Prospective Payment Assessment Commission and the Physician Payment Review Commission. Newhouse chaired the former Commission and served as a Commissioner on the latter. He currently serves on the Committee on National Statistics and on the Science, Technology, and Economic Policy boards of the National Research Council. He served as a regent of the National Library of Medicine from 1999 to 2003. He is a director of Aetna, Abt Associates, and the National Committee for Quality Assurance.

He was the first recipient of the David N. Kershaw Award and Prize of the Association for Public Policy and Management in 1983, which honors persons under 40 who have made a distinguished contribution to the field of public policy analysis and management. In 1988 he received the Baxter Health Services Research Prize for an unusually significant contribution to the improved medical care of the public through innovative health services research, as well as the Administrator’s Citation from the Health Care Financing Administration.  He and his co-authors received the Article-of-the-Year Award in 1989 from AHSR and again in 2006 from AcademyHealth and ISPOR, and in 1992 he received AHSR’s Distinguished Investigator Award.  In 1995 he received the Hans Sigrist Foundation Prize for distinguished scientific achievement, as well as the American Risk and Insurance Association’s Elizur Wright Award for a contribution to the risk management and insurance literature for Free for All?. In 1997 he gave the Walras-Pareto Lectures in Lausanne.  In 2000 he and his co-authors received the first Zvi Griliches award for Are Medical Prices Declining? and he gave the Chung Hua Lectures in Taipei. In 2001 he and his co-authors won the Kenneth J. Arrow Award for How Does Managed Care Do It?, and in 2003 he won the Paul A. Samuelson Certificate of Excellence from TIAA-CREF for Pricing the Priceless.