Biography provided by participant

Henry Aaron has been the Bruce and Virginia MacLaury Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution's Economic Studies Program since 1968, and served as director of the program from 1990 to 1996.

Aaron was a professor of Economics at the University of Maryland from 1967 to 1989.

He served as assistant secretary for planning and evaluation at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare from 1977 to 1978, and was chairman of the Advisory Council on Social Security in 1979.

Aaron was a 1996-7 Guggenheim Fellow at the Stanford University Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences. He is a member of the Board of Directors at Abt Associates and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and a member of the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the advisory committee of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and the Harvard Medical and Dental Schools visiting committee.

He has also served as Board chairman and vice president of the National Academy of Social Insurance; vice president of the American Economic Association; president of the Association of Public Policy and Management; and Board member of the College Retirement Equity Fund at Georgetown University.

Recent publications include "Medicare Reform: Options, Tradeoffs, Opportunities" (with Jeanne Lambrew and Patrick Healy); "Using Taxes To Reform Health Insurance: Pitfalls and Promises" (edited, with Leonard E. Burman); and "Can We Say No: The Challenge of Rationing Health Care" (with Melissa Cox and William B. Schwartz).