Erin Trish, Ph.D.

Erin Trish, Ph.D., is an assistant research professor at the USC Price School of Public Policy and the USC Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics. Her current research is focused on the impact of the Affordable Care Act on insurer and provider markets, trends in employer-sponsored health insurance, and health care spending. Dr. Trish graduated from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2013 with a doctorate in health policy and economics. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the USC Schaeffer Center and the Fielding School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles. Prior to starting graduate school, Dr. Trish worked in a stem cell research lab at Harvard University.

Dr. Trish has received prestigious awards, including the 2014 USC Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar Research Grant. Some of her most recent publications have appeared in Health Affairs and Journal of Health Economics.

In 2012, Dr. Trish completed a HCFO-funded project with Brad Herring, Ph.D., exploring the extent to which insurance concentration and its balance with hospital concentration affect health insurance premiums.

In Dr. Trish’s most recent HCFO-funded grant, she and her colleagues are using private insurance claims to examine (1) prices paid to providers for treating Medicare Advantage enrollees and how these prices compare to those paid for traditional Medicare and commercial patients; (2) the extent to which Medicare Advantage enrollment in a region affects commercial insurance market dynamics and negotiated prices for commercial enrollees; and (3) whether reimbursement generosity in federal Medicare Advantage payments is passed on to providers.  The goal of this research is to inform policy discussions of Medicare Advantage provider payment cuts, potential Medicare reforms such as premium support, the impact of consolidation in private insurance markets, and potential regulation such as limits on charges for out-of-network services.

Dr. Trish was also recently awarded a grant focused on simulating the impact of the ACA’s community rating regulations on firm self-insurance under the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Policy-Relevant Insurance Studies (PRIS) solicitation.

Additional information about Dr. Trish’s HCFO-funded work is available here and here and information on her recent PRIS grant is available here. More detail on her research, her CV, and a list of publications can be found here.