Interviewers: Gopal Sekhar
William Schpero is a health economist and an assistant professor in the Division of Health Policy and Economics within the Department of Population Health Sciences at the Joan & Sanford I. Weill Medical College of Cornell University. He also serves as an Associate Director of the Cornell Health Policy Centre and the Cornell Centre for Health Equity.
William’s research focuses on Medicaid and the healthcare safety net in the United States. His work aims to identify policy mechanisms to address racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities in health and healthcare. He is a co-founder of the Medicaid Data Learning Network and the Medicaid Insights Colloquium. His past research has examined the drivers of waste in the U.S. healthcare system and analyzed the impact of key provisions of the Affordable Care Act.
His work has been published in leading academic journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and Health Affairs. It has also been featured by major news outlets such as Bloomberg, CNBC, Politico, and The Washington Post.
William holds a Ph.D. in health policy and economics from Yale University, where he was also a pre-doctoral fellow in aging and health economics at the National Bureau of Economic Research. For his dissertation research, he received the Annual Student Prize from the International Health Economics Association.