Charles E. Phelps is Provost Emeritus and Professor of Political Science and Economics at the University of Rochester and a Member of the Board of Advisors for the Independent Institute. He received his BA from Pomona College and an MBA and PhD from the University of Chicago.
He began his research career at the RAND Corporation in 1971, and helped found the RAND Health Insurance Study, a large randomized controlled trial assessing the medical use and health outcomes arising from different health insurance coverage; he also served as director of RAND’s Program on Regulatory Policies and Institutions. He joined the University of Rochester in 1984, holding appointments in the departments of Economics and Political Science, and serving as director of the Public Policy Analysis Program and chair of the Department of Community and Preventive Medicine in the schools of Medicine and Dentistry.
The author of more than 60 peer-reviewed articles covering the fields of health economics, health policy, medical decision analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis of various medical interventions and related topics, Phelps also wrote a leading textbook in the field, Health Economics, now in its fifth edition, and the book Eight Questions You Should Ask About Our Health Care System (Even if the Answers Make You Sick).
He has served on the boards of the Council of Library and Information Resources, the Center for Research Libraries, VirtualScopics Inc. and Health Care Cost Institute, and is a consultant for Kaiser Permanente of Northern California’s Division of Research. He has testified before congressional committees on health policy and intellectual property issues on behalf of the Association of American Universities and other higher education organizations and served on three Institute of Medicine committees to develop new approaches for prioritizing vaccine development and use. He was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and is a fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
