Professor of health economics Thomas G. McGuire has been awarded the American Society of Health Economists (ASHEcon) Victor Fuchs Lifetime Achievement Award.

Victor Fuchs is the Henry J. Kaiser Jr. Professor of Economics and of Health Research and Policy, Emeritus at Stanford University and has been called the “dean of health economics” by the New York Times. The Victor Fuchs Lifetime Achievement Award is awarded biennially to an economist who has made significant lifetime contributions to the field of health economics.

Since 2001, McGuire has been a professor of health economics in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. His research focuses on the design and impact of health care payment systems, the economics of health care disparities, and the economics of mental health policy and drug regulation and payment. McGuire has also contributed to the theory of physician, hospital, and health plan payment. His research on health care disparities includes developing approaches to defining and measuring disparities, and studying the theory and measurement of provider discrimination. For more than 35 years, McGuire has conducted academic and policy research on the economics of mental health. His research on drug regulation focuses on brand-generic competition.

For 25 years prior to coming to Harvard, McGuire worked in the Department of Economics at Boston University.  He is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a member of the National Academy of Medicine (formerly Institute of Medicine).  

In 2008, he received the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award from Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. He is a recipient of the Elizur Wright Award from the American Association of Risk and Insurance for his book, Financing Psychotherapy, the Arrow Award from the International Health Economics Association, and the Carl Taube Award from the American Public Health Association. He also received awards for paper of the year in 2008 from Academy Health and the National Institute of Health Care Management (NIHCM). He is also the lead author of a paper on risk adjustment selected by the NIHCM for the paper of the year award for 2013. A coauthored paper on patent settlements in the pharmaceutical industry was named the best paper of the year in the International Journal of the Economics of Business. He has co-chaired four NIMH-sponsored conferences on the Economics of Mental Health, and was a coeditor of the Handbook of Health Economics Volume 2, published in 2012. McGuire is a member of the National Academy of Medicine (formerly the Institute of Medicine) and recently completed ten years as an editor of the Journal of Health Economics. 

McGuire was presented the Victor Fuchs Lifetime Achievement Award at the ASHEcon 7th Annual Meeting in June 2018 at Emory University.

“He’s made fundamental contributions to three different areas of economics research,” said Jon Gruber, Ford Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the presentation ceremony. “In addition to his professional contributions, I just want to highlight that Tom is truly one of the nicest guys in the profession.”

“Anybody that knows my work or knows me knows that I’ve benefitted from working with so many outstanding people in our field,” said McGuire in his acceptance speech, also recounting how through his book Who Shall Live? Victor Fuchs gave him his start in health economics.

Past winners of the Victor Fuchs Lifetime Achievement Award include John D. MacArthur Professor of Health Policy and Management Joseph P. Newhouse (2014). Newhouse celebrates McGuire receiving this award, saying that “Tom’s contributions to health economics have been seminal, and I am delighted the selection committee chose him”.

A video of the presentation speech and of McGuire’s acceptance speech can be viewed on YouTube.