Ha Tu is an expert in commercial insurance markets, provider payment reform, employer health benefit strategies, local health care market dynamics, and Affordable Care Act implementation.
Before joining Mathematica in 2014, she was a senior health researcher at Mathematica's research affiliate, the Center for Studying Health System Change, where she led or served as senior investigator on many qualitative studies of local health care markets, including the Community Tracking Study, a longitudinal study of 12 local health care markets funded primarily by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and a longitudinal study of six California health care markets funded by the California HealthCare Foundation.
Her expertise includes consumer health and health care price transparency, and she led studies focusing on employer approaches to health care cost containment, including use of workplace clinics, wellness programs, and specialty drug management strategies. An experienced policy analyst, she has also conducted extensive research on consumer topics in health care, including consumers’ shopping behavior in health care markets, consumers’ propensity to seek and use health care price and quality information, and consumers’ willingness to trade off provider choice for cost savings.
Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journal articles such as the New England Journal of Medicine, Health Affairs, and Inquiry, among others. The author of numerous papers describing local health care markets, she holds a master’s degree in public affairs with a concentration in applied economics from Princeton University.