Academy Fellow

Australians face rising out-of-pocket costs, specialist gap fees and insurance premiums, yet major health reforms are often made with little evidence about what works. Professor Yuting Zhang, at the Melbourne Institute: Applied Economic & Social Research and Founding Director of the Health Analytics, Leadership and Economics (HALE) Hub at the University of Melbourne, helps to close that gap. Using rigorous causal methods and some of the nation’s largest linked administrative datasets, she evaluates how health policies affect patients, providers and taxpayers, and uses the findings to support policy reform.

Her research has changed policy in two national health systems. Trained at Harvard and formerly a tenured professor at the University of Pittsburgh, she led a series of New England Journal of Medicine studies on the US Medicare drug benefit. Her 2009 NEJM paper was among the first to show causally that better drug coverage reduces spending on other medical care, evidence that changed how the US Congressional Budget Office costs prescription drug policy. Her Medicare research has been cited repeatedly by the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission in its reports to Congress and in federal rulemaking, and her co-authored work on opioid and benzodiazepine prescribing informed the 2022 CDC Clinical Practice Guideline for Prescribing Opioids.

In Australia, supported by an ARC Future Fellowship, together with her coauthors, she produced rigorous causal evidence that the Commonwealth’s $7.6 billion-a-year private health insurance incentives do little to reduce public hospital waiting lists and mainly benefit those who do not need rebates. Her study of older Australians’ responses to rebates (Health Economics, 2023) underpinned the Parliamentary Budget Office costing behind the 2026 federal budget decision to remove age-based rebate tiers. The Minister for Health cited her and coauthors’ modelling, and the Senate committee that recommended the legislation be passed cited their evidence.

Across more than 110 peer-reviewed articles, her research has been cited in 49 policy and government documents from 33 organisations in more than eight countries, including the World Bank and the OECD. Her advice has been sought by the US National Academy of Medicine, the Australian Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, and the Victorian Department of Health. A committed public communicator, she has written 26 articles for The Conversation, which have been read more than half a million times, and is regularly interviewed by the ABC, SBS, The Guardian and the BBC.

Through the HALE Hub, Professor Zhang and colleagues are building a national evidence engine for health reform: a team that links tax, Medicare, pharmaceutical, hospital and social-services data to test whether health policies deliver value for money and fairness. With partners and philanthropic support, the Hub aspires to become a lasting resource that helps Australia use the best evidence available to design future health reforms.

2024–present: Founding Director, Health Analytics, Leadership and Economics (HALE) Hub, University of Melbourne

2018–present: Professor of Health Economics, Melbourne Institute: Applied Economic & Social Research, Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Melbourne

2012–2018: Associate Professor of Health Economics (with tenure), Department of Health Policy & Management, Graduate School of Public Health, University of Pittsburgh

2010–2018: Director, Pharmaceutical Economics Research Group, University of Pittsburgh

2007–2012: Assistant Professor, Department of Health Policy & Management, Graduate School of Public Health, University of Pittsburgh

2026: Fellow, Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (FASSA)

2021–2026: Australian Research Council Future Fellowship

2025: Dean’s Research Engagement and Partnership Award, Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Melbourne

2016–2017: Australian-American Health Policy Fellowship

2009: Excellence in Mental Health Policy and Economics Research Award, International Center for Mental Health Policy and Economics

2004–2006: Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship

2021-present: Advisory Board member, The Lancet - Regional Health West Pacific

2021-2025: Co-Chair and member, the Arrow Award Committee, the International Health Economics Association (iHEA), highest award in health economics, / which awards an annual prize in honour of Nobel Laureate Kenneth Arrow for the best paper in the field of health economics

Member, Australian Health Economics Society; Member, International Health Economics Association

Kettlewell, N & Zhang, Y 2024, ‘Financial incentives and private health insurance demand on the extensive and intensive margins’, Journal of Health Economics, vol. 94, 102863.

Yang, O, Yong, J & Zhang, Y 2024, ‘Effects of private health insurance on waiting time in public hospitals’, Health Economics, vol. 33, no. 6, pp. 1121–1141.

Liu, J & Zhang, Y 2023, ‘Elderly responses to private health insurance incentives: evidence from Australia’, Health Economics, vol. 32, no. 12, pp. 2730–2744.

Zhang, Y, Zhou, C & Baik, SH 2014, ‘A simple change to the Medicare Part D low-income subsidy program could save $5 billion’, Health Affairs, vol. 33, no. 6, pp. 940–945.

Zhang, Y, Donohue, JM, Lave, JR, O’Donnell, G & Newhouse, JP 2009, ‘The effect of Medicare Part D on drug and medical spending’, New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 361, no. 1, pp. 52–61.