Policy Advisory Committee
The Policy Advisory Committee advises the Medicare Rights Center on strategy and priorities for its policy agenda. The PAC consists of leading progressive health policy experts with extensive experience in academia, Congress and Medicare administration. The PAC meets quarterly to discuss and advise on key policy initiatives, provide perspective on the political context for these initiatives and identify policy options and strategic openings to achieve the Medicare Rights Center's policy goals.
Marilyn Moon
Brian Biles
Chris DeYoung
Stuart Guterman
Jack Hoadley
Laura Summer
Marilyn Moon, Ph.D. is vice president and director of the Health Program at the American Institutes for Research. A nationally known expert on Medicare, she has also served as a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and as a public trustee for the Social Security and Medicare trust funds. Dr. Moon has written extensively on health policy, both for the elderly and the population in general, and on social insurance issues. Her most recent book, Medicare: A Policy Primer, was published in 2006. From 1993 to 2000, Dr. Moon also wrote a column for the Washington Post on health reform and health coverage issues. She is currently the chair of the Maryland Health Care Commission, and is on the board of the National Academy of Social Insurance. Dr. Moon earned a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Previously, she was an associate professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, a senior analyst at the Congressional Budget Office, and the founding director of the Public Policy Institute of the American Association of Retired Persons.
Brian Biles, M.D., M.P.H., is a professor in the Department of Health Policy in the School of Public Health and Health Services at the George Washington University. He served for five years as the senior vice president of the Commonwealth Fund and for seven years as staff director of the Subcommittee on Health of the House Ways and Means Committee. Dr. Biles received his doctor of medicine from the University of Kansas and his master of public health degree from Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Chris DeYoung is the Acting Director of the Health Insurance Counseling Project, part of the George Washington University Law School’s Community Legal Clinics. From 2003 to 2005, he worked with the Medicare Rights Center on both policy and education issues. Since that time, Chris has been actively engaged in improving access to affordable health care services for people with Medicare in the District of Columbia—focusing on expanding eligibility for the Medicare Savings Programs and simplifying enrollment for eligible residents. Chris has an M.A. in Applied Anthropology, and worked in the field of human rights and conflict resolution prior to focusing on domestic health care issues.
Stuart Guterman is assistant vice president and director of the Commonwealth Fund's Program on Medicare's Future, based at AcademyHealth in Washington, D.C. He is responsible for the Fund's research agenda on Medicare issues and Medicare's role in achieving a high performance health system, and analyses related to the current performance and future improvements in the Medicare program and the health system overall.
Mr. Guterman was director of the Office of Research, Development, and Information at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services from 2002 to 2005. Prior to that, he was a senior analyst at the Congressional Budget Office, a principal research associate in the health policy center at the Urban Institute, and deputy director of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (and its predecessor, the Prospective Payment Assessment Commission) from 1988 through 1999. Previously, Mr. Guterman was chief of institutional studies in the Health Care Financing Administration's Office of Research, where he directed the evaluation of the Medicare Prospective Payment System for inpatient hospital services and other intramural and extramural research on hospital payment.
Mr. Guterman received an A.B. in Economics from Rutgers University and an M.A. in Economics from Brown University, and did additional graduate work at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
Jack Hoadley, Ph.D., is a health policy analyst and researcher with about 25 years' experience in this field. He joined Georgetown University's Health Policy Institute as a research professor in January 2002, and is conducting research projects on health financing topics, including Medicare and Medicaid, with a particular focus on prescription drug issues. Recent projects have included studies of the use of formularies by Medicare drug plans, the impact of the Medicare drug benefit's coverage gap, options for simplifying and standardizing Medicare's drug benefit and its managed care program, the use of evidence-based medicine to manage pharmacy costs for Medicaid, and an evaluation of recent changes to Florida's Medicaid program. He is trained as a Ph.D. in political science and has worked in both academic and government settings. Prior to arriving at Georgetown, he held positions at the Department of Health and Human Services in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE), the Physician Payment Review Commission (PPRC) and its successor, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), and the National Health Policy Forum.
Laura Summer is a Senior Research Scholar at Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute. She has over 20 years of experience in federal and state government, independent policy organizations and academic institutions. She directs research that examines how states design, administer and operate publicly financed health and long-term care programs. A particular focus of her research is on methods to increase enrollment in public benefit programs. She has written extensively about access to health insurance and health and long-term care for populations of all ages, as well as about the operation of the Medicaid and Medicare programs. Ms. Summer has been a member of the Georgetown faculty for eight years and served as the Deputy Director for the Institute’s Center on an Aging Society. She holds a Master of Public Health degree from the University of Michigan.