Charles Roehrig

Charles Roehrig
Vice President and Director, Altarum Center for Sustainable Health Spending

Dr. Charles Roehrig is a vice president and director of Altarum’s Center for Sustainable Health Spending. A health care economist and econometrician, Roehrig specializes in health sector modeling and analysis.

Dr. Roehrig is the lead designer of the Altarum Health Sector Model (AHSM), which represents the process by which population health status, access to care, and payment rates combine to determine national and state health expenditures. He is currently applying AHSM to the financial analysis of state-level health reform proposals. Previous applications include forecasting national health expenditures in a consumer-driven health care environment (presented to the 2006 National Consumer Driven Health Care Summit) and a study of early retirees who are at risk of losing their employer-sponsored coverage.

Dr. Roehrig is also developing time-series estimates of national expenditures by medical condition. These estimates are benchmarked to official government estimates of personal health expenditures from the National Health Expenditure Accounts (NHEA). Thus they cover spending by the civilian non-institutional population as well as the various institutionalized populations and the military. These estimates will provide policymakers with critical information on trends in spending by medical condition. They will also create the basis for adding medical condition forecasts to AHSM.

Dr. Roehrig has many years of experience in forecasting health workforce supply and requirements. He is the lead designer of a number of models used by the U.S. Bureau of Health Professions (BHPr), including the Physician Supply Model (PSM) and Physician Demand Model (PDM). He recently developed physician supply and requirements estimates for the State of Michigan.

ther current research interests include: the impact of overall economic performance on the health sector; modeling the determinants of spending by medical condition; modeling individual preferences for alternative benefit designs; and health insurer risk-based capital requirements.

Dr. Roehrig has lectured in economics at the University of Michigan and served as a research associate of the University of Michigan School of Public Health. In addition to his applied research, he has published in the field of theoretical econometrics in academic journals such as Econometrica and the Journal of Econometrics.

Dr. Roehrig holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan, a master of science degree in statistics from the University of Michigan, and a bachelor of arts degree in economics from Amherst College.

Charles Roehrig's Posts

A Brief History of Health Spending Since 1965

In 1965 health spending was 6 percent. As of June 2011, it sits at 18.2 percent. This blog piece traces the growth in health spending share of GDP from 1965 to present and identifies important historical patterns and bends in the curve.

Must We Bend the Health Care Employment Curve?

If health care jobs had simply stayed constant since the start of the recession, there would be 2.2 million more Americans out of work today and the unemployment rate would be 10.6 percent versus 9.2 percent.

The Case for Tracking Health Spending as a Share of “Potential” GDP

Filtering out misleading signals from business cycles provides a clearer view of whether health spending is on a sustainable path.

How to Recognize a Bent Health Care Cost Curve

Health spending has grown at historically low rates for the past 28 months, and its share of the GDP has remained stable since June 2009. Are these findings evidence of a bend in the health care cost curve?