Health Analyst

The Health Analysis Division (HAD) seeks an analyst to model the effects of health policies and prepare technical information, reports, and testimony for Congress. The division is developing modeling capacity across a range of health policy areas, including health insurance markets and enrollment, cost sharing in Medicare, long-term care, and prescription drug prices and spending (for example, price negotiation in Medicare Part D).

The analyst can expect to collaborate with colleagues in HAD as well as throughout the agency to contribute to a number of analytic modeling efforts. Those efforts could include the following:

• Estimating discrete choice models of how people and employers make insurance and other health care decisions;
• Building and validating microsimulation and other statistical models to forecast behavior and spending and to impute missing or unobserved characteristics in survey and administrative data; and
• Improving the code, data pipelines, and testing that support CBO’s models.

HAD has recently completed analyses on a wide variety of topics, including federal subsidies for health insurance coverage, federal policy approaches for addressing the opioid crisis, the 340B drug pricing program, the federal budgetary effects of a program to expand treatment of hepatitis C, health insurance options for small businesses, approaches for reducing prescription drug prices, the federal budgetary effects of authorizing Medicare to cover anti-obesity medications, the effects of not extending the enhanced premium tax credits on health insurance coverage and premiums, and approaches for reducing prices that commercial insurers pay for medical services.

The division’s ongoing work includes studies on a broad range of topics, including state-directed payments in Medicaid, spending growth in the Medicare Part D program, the impact of the No Surprises Act on health care prices and premiums, factors affecting demand for and spending on long-term services and supports, factors affecting investment in new drug development, projections of Medicare spending, nongroup health insurance, and price transparency.

Topics of analyses will shift over time, providing new opportunities for professional development and for contributing to CBO’s work for Congress. The analyst will interact with a broad range of academic and industry specialists and collaborate with staff across the agency to develop estimates of the federal costs of legislative proposals as well as baseline estimates of the cost of government programs. Analysts are supported in disseminating both the agency’s core work and their own adjacent research through CBO working papers and academic journal articles.

Qualifications

Special consideration will be given to applicants with expertise in one or more of the following methods or topics: microsimulation, forecasting, Medicaid, long-term care, prevention, prescription drugs, commercial health insurance, and medical prices in the commercial market.

Applicants must have a Ph.D. in biostatistics, data science, economics, health economics, health policy, public policy, statistics, or a related discipline, or a master’s degree in one of those disciplines with a quantitative focus and at least three years of relevant experience. That experience may include health policy analysis or applied statistical modeling or forecasting.

Applicants should have an interest in the development of policy-relevant models, strong quantitative skills, experience with large-scale data and reproducible workflows, and an in-depth knowledge of at least one programming language (with a preference for Python or R).

Applicants should want to work on issues of current or potential legislative interest to the Congress; be able to initiate and complete research projects both independently and with a team; and be able to clearly present their work orally and in writing to nontechnical audiences. People who are not citizens of the United States should review CBO’s citizenship requirements or contact [email protected] for assistance in determining eligibility.

This position follows a hybrid work schedule and requires employees to work in person in the Washington, D.C., office on designated core days. Additional in-office days may be required on the basis of operational needs. Full-time telework is not available for this position.