Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University

Katherine Swartz

Director, The Robert Wood Johnson Scholars in Health Policy Research Program

Prof. Swartz's research interests focus on the population without health insurance and efforts to increase access to health care coverage, as well as health care financing and organization. Within this range of topics, she is currently examining whether regulations of insurance markets and subsidies of premiums can effectively increase access to health insurance. She also has begun a project on the impact of the mapping of the human genome and its implications for health insurance; in particular, what types of genetic illnesses and conditions will no longer be insurable by private insurance companies, and the role that government may have in providing financing of genetic therapies and tests. Prof. Swartz's research has demonstrated the heterogeneity of people without health insurance in terms of their socio-economic characteristics and the different lengths of time people spend in spells without insurance.

Prof. Swartz was the principal investigator for a recently completed Commonwealth Fund evaluation of New York State's Healthy New York Program, which subsidizes health insurance for low-income individuals and small firms with low-wage workers by having a state reinsurance pool for high-cost claims. During the 2000-01 academic year, Prof. Swartz was a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, where she wrote a book on the uninsured and how government might increase access to private health insurance coverage. She is currently the principal investigator of a project funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to study regulations of the individual insurance markets. Since November 1995, Prof. Swartz has been the Editor of Inquiry, a journal that focuses on health care organization, provision, and financing.

Prof. Swartz was a Senior Research Associate at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C. for ten years before joining the HSPH faculty. She was the 1991 recipient of the David Kershaw Award from the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management for research done before the age of 40 that has had a significant impact on public policy.