Eric Roberts

Currently, my work examines the effects of recent payment reforms in Maryland (hospital global budgets) and Medicare (the Value-Based Payment Modifier and its successor program, the MIPS), their incentives for provider behavior, effects on health care use, and implications for providers serving high-need and high-cost patients.

My job market paper, which examines a series of hospital payment reforms in Maryland, culminating in the introduction of hospital-wide global budgets, is here. Forthcoming work on this topic examines the longer-term effects of global budgets on health care spending and use - including unintended effects on provider behavior - in Maryland.

In the long term, my research goals are to study policies that affect access to and quality of care in disadvantaged populations. I am interested in the determinants of provider participation in Medicaid, patient transitions between Medicaid and low-cost private insurance plans, payment reforms affecting safety-net providers, and the interaction between social services and supports with public health insurance. The aim of this work will be to use policy experiments and advanced econometric methods to identify policies that improve the coordination and effectiveness of services delivered to Medicaid beneficiaries.