Green Mountain Care Board officials say they have nothing to hide.
So when Anya Rader Wallack, director of the board, was asked if her husband had any influence on Vermont health care policy, she spoke openly on the subject.
“He has none other than he’s married to me and accommodates my crazy lifestyle,” she said.
Her husband, Stanley Wallack, is the director and co-founder of the Schneider Institutes for Health Policy at Brandeis University.
A legislative memorandum issued by the board in March cited an article co-authored by Stanley Wallack (the memorandum). The article cited was published in a well-respected peer-reviewed journal for health policy, called Health Affairs.
The 2003 article, titled “Realigning Incentives in Fee-For-Service Medicare,” has been widely cited. Rader Wallack said the board used it to explain a payment model — the same model that the state of Oregon used Stanley Wallack’s work to substantiate in 2008.
“There aren’t a lot of people who have done research on payment reform,” said Rader Wallack. “Stan and Chris (Tompkins, a professor at Brandeis) published that quite a few years ago, and it remains one of the seminal articles on how to move away from fee-for-service … This is (his) area of expertise and it happens to overlap with mine to some extent.”
Asked about how the board has chosen articles it cited in grants, memorandums and other works, Wallack said her team looks for the peer-reviewed work with the greatest merit.
“We look at what are the best sources, and frankly we do it blind to who the author is,” she said. “We look at what’s the best evidence and who’s been able to get their writing through the peer review process, which suggests that there’s a certain integrity to the research.”
Stanley Wallack’s work was also referenced in a June presentation to the board by Anna Gosline, director of policy and research for the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation, and another one of his articles, titled “National Health Expenditure Limits: The Case for a Global Budget Process,” is posted on the board’s website.
Though her husband has not consulted to the board, a group of his colleagues at Brandeis was subcontracted out by one of the board’s consultants. The contract is available here.
Wallack maintains that her husband has no direct influence over health care policymaking in Vermont. “Although he does tell me his opinion every day on just about everything,” she said.
If he were significantly influencing Rader Wallack’s policy decisions, such actions could be viewed as a conflict of interest and thus a violation of Gov. Peter Shumlin’s Executive Code of Ethics, which prohibits governor appointees from matters presenting a “conflict of interest” or the “appearance of a conflict of interest.”
Asked if Stanley Wallack had ever consulted to or received payment from the board, Rader Wallack and the board’s Executive Director Georgia Maheras said he hadn’t. A review of the board’s contracts, which are posted on its website for the public to view, substantiated this claim.
Previously, Stanley Wallack worked with Rader Wallack while she was president of the health policy-consulting firm Arrowhead Health Analytics, LLC.
