Mark B. McClellan, M.D., Ph.D.

Mark B. McClellan, M.D., Ph.D., Senior Fellow, AEI - Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, The Brookings Institution

Dr. Mark B. McClellan, former administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and former commissioner of the Food and Drug

Administration (FDA) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, recently joined the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies as a visiting senior fellow. At AEI and Brookings, Dr. McClellan will work on developing and implementing ideas to drive improvements in high-quality, innovative, affordable health care.

Dr. McClellan has just completed a highly distinguished tenure of public service.

In the Bush administration, he served as a member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers and senior director for health care policy at the White House

(2001–2002), FDA commissioner (2002–2004), and CMS administrator since March 2004. In these positions, he developed and implemented major reforms in health policy. These include:

• The Medicare prescription drug benefit and other innovative coverage options, including the move from indemnity insurance to personalized, prevention-oriented care;
• Innovative approaches to coverage in Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, including roadmaps that states have used to update and expand coverage and the “Money Follows the Person” initiatives in long-term care;
• The development of the FDA’s Critical Path initiative, regulatory reforms to modernize pharmaceutical manufacturing, efficient risk management methods to better address safety issues, and reforms to speed the approval of low-cost generic medicines and improve the availability of safe and effective treatments; and
• Public-private initiatives to develop better information on the quality and cost of care, and steps to help consumers and providers use this information to improve care, including performance-based provider payment reforms, and Health Savings Accounts and Health Reimbursement Arrangements.

Dr. McClellan has been widely praised for his efforts to improve the American health care system and make entitlement programs more effective and sound for the future. His work at the AEI-Brookings Joint Center will similarly focus on improving care and eliminating excess health care costs—by identifying and helping to implement steps in the public and private sector to speed the development and use of safe and effective new treatments, and to reform payment and regulatory systems to increase access to high-quality, innovative care that prevents diseases and disease complications at the lowest possible cost.

During his time as a Joint Center visiting scholar, Dr. McClellan will remain an associate professor of economics and associate professor of medicine at Stanford University, from which he was on leave during his government service. In the Clinton administration, Dr. McClellan was deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury for economic policy from 1998–1999, supervising economic analysis and policy development on a range of domestic policy issues. He subsequently directed Stanford’s Program on Health Outcomes Research and was a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Additionally, he was associate editor of the Journal of Health Economics and co-principal investigator of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a longitudinal study of the health and economic wellbeing of older Americans.

A graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, he earned his M.P.A. from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in 1991, his M.D. from the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology in 1992, and his Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 1993. He completed his residency training in internal medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston. Dr. McClellan has been board-certified in Internal Medicine and has been a practicing internist during his academic career. His academic research has been concerned with the effectiveness of medical treatments in improving health, the economic and policy factors influencing medical treatment decisions and health outcomes, the impact of new technologies on public health and medical expenditures, and the relationship between health status and economic well-being. He has twice received the Kenneth J. Arrow Award for Outstanding Research in Health Economics.