Cornell President David Skorton hailed the passage this spring of the 2010 Affordable Care Act as a "strong first step" toward affordable, quality health care for all Americans at the Third Biennial Conference of the American Society of Health Economists (ASHEcon), hosted on campus June 20-23.

The work of the more than 700 assembled health economists from academia, government and the medical profession will be critical to lowering health care costs, improving patient safety and quality of care and alleviating such public health issues as obesity and smoking as health care reform laws are implemented, Skorton said.

The four-day conference featured more than 600 research papers and 100 posters on domestic health care reform, the uninsured, private and public plans, aging and health and the economic and societal costs of substance abuse, chronic diseases and other public health concerns.

With health care expenditures accounting for greater than 15 percent of the U.S. annual gross domestic product and millions of Americans uninsured, ASHEcon executive director Richard Arnould, emeritus professor of economics at the University of Illinois, said the field provides critical insights into controlling spiraling health care costs and improving access.

"While health economists cannot provide medical solutions, data exist in many areas that permit them to estimate the costs of different proposed actions, as well as the impact of those actions on the economic behavior of the patients and providers," he said.

The conference, sponsored by the Sloan Program in Health Administration and the Department of Policy Analysis and Management in Cornell's College of Human Ecology, was co-hosted by Syracuse University and the University of Rochester.

"It is an honor for Cornell to have been selected as the conference site, especially because of the strong interests of our faculty in the areas of both health care organization and policy and the study of health behaviors," added William White, director of the Sloan Program.

Ted Boscia is assistant director of communications for the College of Human Ecology.