E. Kathleen  Adams

Dr. Kathleen Adams is Professor in the Rollins School of Public Health (RSPH) at Emory University and also works as a Health Economist in the CDC's Division of Reproductive Health (DRH). At RSPH she teaches graduate classes on Public Finance and the Health Care System and Healthcare Access. She has over 25 years of experience in applied economic analysis with much of her research focused on low-income and vulnerable populations and on Medicaid policies and issues.

In her work with the CDC's DRH she has analyzed prenatal smoking/risk behaviors, costs of adverse maternal/infant outcomes and pediatric health care costs related to secondhand smoke. She and colleagues have completed extensive analysis on national policies such as welfare reform, Medicaid family planning waivers and at the state level, on the implementation of primary care case management among S-CHIP (State Children’s Health Insurance Program) and Medicaid children.

Current projects include the impact of excise taxes on maternal smoking before, during and after pregnancy as well as the impact of premium increases on the enrollment of children in Georgia’s CHIP program. Other work includes analysis of the Breast and Cervical Cancer Prevention and Treatment Act (BCCPTA) in terms of its effects on Medicaid enrollment, time to enrollment and treatment among women with these cancers. She is also completing a project for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to estimate the incidence of health care financing for all families in the US in 2004 using the Current Population Survey, numerous data sources on public spending, private premiums and out of pocket payments. Theory on tax incidence and labor market adjustments are used to allocate the public and private payments to each family based on their share of the appropriate revenue base.

Prior to coming to Emory University in 1993, she was Senior Economist with SysteMetrics (then Medstat and now Thomson Reuters), a consulting firm that did extensive work for federal and state government agencies on the effects of public policies on access, utilization and health care cost with a focus on Medicaid populations. Prior to that she was Health Economist and Policy Analyst, Division of Insurance, Commonwealth of Massachusetts where she did expert witnessing for the state on setting malpractice premiums.

Dr. Adams’s undergraduate training is in mathematics and economics from Florida State University, 1970. She received her Master’s in Economics also from Florida State in 1972 and her Doctorate in Economics from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1979. 

Dr. Adams has published over 90 articles on topics ranging from hospital markets and hospital choice among rural Medicare beneficiaries to physician participation in Medicaid and effects of this participation on access to services for Medicaid and CHIP (Children’s Health Insurance Program) enrolled children.