Overview
Jonathan Skinner is the John French Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College and Senior Research Associate at Dartmouth Medical School, and an NBER research associate. His research spans Medicare spending, geographic variation in health care use, aging and retirement, and Social Security finances. He is particularly known for documenting and explaining the wide variation in Medicare spending across U.S. regions despite similar health outcomes.
Key Contributions / Features
- Will baby boomers bust the federal budget? (Lee and Skinner 1999): Co-authored JEP survey documenting SSA mortality projections as too pessimistic relative to international evidence; showed that a 2.2 pp payroll tax increase leaves a 75% probability of Social Security exhaustion by 2070; argued that longer life barely increases Medicare costs but medical technology is the dominant risk.
- Geographic variation in Medicare spending (Skinner and Fisher 1997, Wennberg and Cooper 1997): Documented that per-capita Medicare spending in Miami (7,874)ismorethantwicethatinMinneapolis(3,722) despite similar health outcomes; benchmarking high-cost regions to Minneapolis would restore Medicare solvency.
- Assessing forecasts of mortality, health status and health costs (Lee and Skinner 1996): Earlier policy report for CBO on baby boomers' retirement forecasting.
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