August 23, 2024 | Erin Bluvas, bluvase@sc.edu
The Department of Health Services Policy and Management’s (HSPM) newest assistant professor has more than two decades of public policy experience. Fresh from his doctoral program in population health sciences at Duke University, David Anderson brings both an insider view and a population level perspective to his research on individual choice health insurance markets.
“The HSPM department is a hive of pragmatic researchers that seek to bring understanding to problems and questions that have immediate, real-world impact,” Anderson says. “I feel incredibly confident that my intellectual journey will be well supported at the Arnold School, and I’m excited to teach all students, undergraduates and graduate, as I continue to expand my curiosity towards real-world problems that we can solve.”
Always fascinated by public policy, Anderson earned back-to-back degrees in history and policy (bachelor’s) and public policy and management (master’s) at Carnegie Mellon University. He spent the next eight years as a program evaluator for various social service agencies in the Pittsburgh area.
Anderson didn’t enter the health field until 2011, when he took a position as a business analyst with UPMC Health Plan. Within six months, he knew he had landed in a complex, intriguing field that he didn’t want to leave.
The six years he spent at the insurance company overlapped with the early years of the Affordable Care Act, and Anderson was captivated. He worked through the intersecting layers of factors and impacts that surrounded this legislation by contributing to a blog (under a pen name) to share the perspective of the insurer. Anderson expected to have exhausted his thoughts after a few months and 30,000 words, but 11 years and 1.5 million words later, he still has much to say.
“I found the ACA to be intellectually fascinating and writing about it almost every day allowed me to exercise my policy analysis training and my professional background while explaining a very complex policy to a public that was desperate for understanding,” he says.
This journey led Anderson to join the Duke University’s Margolis Center for Health Policy as a research associate, where he could continue to explore these issues through an independent research agenda. Enrolling in his employer’s doctoral program was a natural next step.
Over the past several years, Anderson’s interests have evolved into three areas related to the ACA’s individual health insurance markets. He looks at individual choices associated with enrollment and health care service utilization, the way insurers respond to policy (including their efforts to maximize enrollment of certain individuals and minimize enrollment of others), and, finally, public policy options that can make these markets function smoothly.
Anderson loves that his work has real-world impacts. For example, collaborations with Petra Rasmussen and Coleman Drake resulted in a new automatic re-enrollment algorithm that was adopted by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services earlier this year.
“Dr. Anderson is not only a remarkably productive scholar with an extensive network of collaborators, but also a passionate educator whose natural curiosity and desire to make a real-world impact are contagious," says HSPM department chair Brad Wright. "While he joins us as a newly minted assistant professor, he is already a nationally recognized expert on the dynamics of health insurance markets. In short, all of us in HSPM are beyond excited to welcome him to the department.”