David Cutler

Who is David Cutler?

David Matthew Cutler is the Otto Eckstein Professor of Applied Economics at Harvard University. He holds a joint appointment in the economics department and in Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and the Harvard School of Public Health. He graduated from Harvard College, summa cum laude, with a degree in Economics, and then joined the Harvard faculty after receiving his Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1991. He served in the administration of Bill Clinton and was the senior health care advisor to Barack Obama. From 2003-2008 Cutler was Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences for Social Sciences.

While his work on health economics covers a broad range of subtopics, he is particularly notable for his work on the value of the health care system as a whole. Much of his work argues that the United States has realized good "bang for its buck" by any reasonable measure of the value of a statistical year of life in good health. That is, while health care is extremely expensive, Americans also place a very high value on documentable health gains. He also argues that they could gain considerably more health for the dollar if reimbursement for care were tied to the health value of the service instead of the intensity of the service.