Faculty Focus: Maria Polyakova Investigates Impact of Public Policy on Health Care & Health Outcomes
In this faculty focus, we take a closer look at the work of Maria Polyakova, an assistant professor of health policy and a faculty fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. She is a health economist who investigates questions surrounding the role of government in the design and financing of health insurance systems. Polyakova, who has PhD in economics from MIT and joined SHP in 2014, is particularly interested in the relationship between public policies and the decisions made by individuals when choosing health care and insurance.
Her recent study on U.S. physician pay was featured twice in The Washington Post earlier this year; the first story focusing on how much physicians earn, and the second on where physicians choose to live in this country — and why. One key finding was illuminating: Physicians are among the highest earners in the United States, with an average of $350,000 in annual earnings, but those personal earnings account for only 8.6% of national health-care spending.
Like many of her SHP colleagues who quickly pivoted to research on the impact of COVID-19 when the pandemic swept across the country, one of Polyakova’s studies linked government survey and administrative data to uncover striking differences across demographic and socioeconomic groups in economic and health impacts of the first year of the pandemic.
SHP asked Polakova about her current research:
My most recent work develops the idea that health insurance can be a powerful labor market and industrial policy that affects the allocation of talent in and outside of healthcare. I am working on two projects related to this theme. The first one studies how payment policies in the U.S. affect the income of physicians, their choice of where and how much to work, as well as their choice of specialties. The second project has a bit of a historical flavor. It studies how a rollout of universal long-term care insurance doubled the number of workers in the long-term care industry in Germany in the mid 1990s.
SHP also wanted Polyakova to tell us what she enjoys in her down time — and one thing we likely don't know about her:
I am a big fan of cozy evenings with cooperative board games. I love the symphony. And I was on MIT’s ballroom dance team as a graduate student. 💃🏻💃🏻
Polyakova addresses the Stanford Health Policy Advancing Health Equity Symposium, talking about how innovations in medical technology take a long time to trickle down to lower-income families, which in turn contributes to their poorer health outcomes.
