Summary
Professor Elizabeth Savage is one of Australia’s leading researchers on health care funding, private health insurance and health service use. Much of her experience is at the interface between research and policy.
She has two current ARC Discovery Projects, one analysing the impact of elective surgery waiting times in public hospitals on the demand for private insurance and private hospital care, and the other modelling the structure of health care subsidies in order to to determine the extent of deviations between current subsidies and alternatives based on predicted patient health risk. She is also an Associate Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence on Population Ageing. Her research on private health insurance and risk selection won the Australian Health Economics Society Research Prize in 2009.
She was lead member of the Review of the Extended Medicare Safety Net which resulted in policy changes introduced in the 2009-2010 Budget. She is also a member of a Health Economics Advisory Panel for the Australian Department of Health and Ageing and has been an invited member of the Resource Distribution Formula Technical Committee for the NSW Department of Health.
In 2008 she was invited to give evidence to the Senate Economics Subcommittee Inquiry into the Medicare Levy Surcharge Thresholds and, in 2009, she participated in workshops for the Productivity Commission Inquiry into ‘The Performance of Public and Private Hospital Systems’ in Australia. In 2008 she was a member of the Long Term National Health Strategy group at the Australia 2020 Summit.
She was President of the NSW Branch of the Economics Society of Australia from 2005-2007, is currently an invited member of the Finance Committee of the International Health Economics Association and was previously a member the iHEA Scientific Committee.
Experience
- Professor of Health Economics, University of Technology Sydney 2002 – present
Education
- London School of Economics, MSc(Econ)
Research Areas
- Public Economics Publically Provided Goods (140214)