Merton Finkler, professor of economics, a member of the Lawrence faculty since
1979, takes an economist’s-eye view of the key issues in health care
and health policy and, for nearly 20 years has been a respected authority
in that field.
In 1986 he was selected as a Robert Wood Johnson Faculty Fellow in Health Care Finance and spent a year in the Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program in California. In 1993-94, when health-care reform was a topic of widespread interest, he co-chaired two Lawrence conferences on health policy guidelines for policy makers and made presentations before both the Wisconsin Assembly and Senate health committees. He is co-founder of Innovative Health Associates, a consulting firm, and has served on the Wisconsin Governor’s Task Force on Funding of Academic Medical Centers, on the state’s Turning Point project on the transformation of public health services, and on a grant-review committee for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Most recently, his research efforts have focused on the role of competition in medical-care markets. In addition to his health-care research, he has become interested in the subject of urban economic growth and its consequences. In this connection, Professor Finkler and Mark Frazier of the government department led a Freeman Foundation grant-funded trip with 12 students to study economic and political integration in China, and they now are creating an internship-workshop program to link Lawrence students and Wisconsin companies to their Chinese counterparts, an effort made possible by a grant from the Bradley Foundation.
Pictured with Professor Finkler are Max Beltzer, ’07, and Danielle Jordan, ’07.