Betsy Cliff
Assistant Professor
Department of Public Health Sciences and the College
Betsy Cliff is a health economist and health services researcher who studies topics related to how consumer-directed incentives affect service utilization and spending in the medical system. Her published work has looked at the effects of cost sharing on low-value care, benefit design in commercial insurance, enrollee premiums in Medicaid, and the use of consumer shopping tools. She primarily focuses on using econometric techniques with large administrative claims databases to identify policy effects.
Her scholarly research, which has received funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, has been published in The New England Journal of Medicine, American Journal of Health Economics, Medical Care, The Milbank Quarterly, Health Services Research, JAMA Health Forum, and Health Affairs. Prior to her doctoral studies, she was a journalist, writing about a variety of health system and public health topics, including hospital finance, mental health, emergency preparedness, quality improvement, price shopping, the challenges of seeking health care without insurance, and consumer financial burdens.
Cliff holds a BA in government cum laude from Dartmouth College; an MS in journalism from the Columbia University Journalism School; and a PhD in health services organization and policy with an economics concentration from the University of Michigan School of Public Health. Most recently, she was an assistant professor at the University of Illinois Chicago School of Public Health.