José J. Escarce, M.D., Ph.D.

José J. Escarce, M.D., Ph.D. is Professor of Medicine in the UCLA School of Medicine, where he serves as an Associate Director of the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program, and Senior Natural Scientist at RAND. He holds a B.A. from Princeton, M.A. from Harvard, and M.D. and Ph.D. in health economics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Before starting his academic career, he practiced internal medicine in a community health center in San Ysidro, California, a border town south of San Diego.
Dr. Escarce has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles examining the effects of market forces on access, costs, and quality of health care; racial and socioeconomic disparities in care; and medical technology adoption. Recently, he has begun work on immigrant health and on how neighborhood environments
affect health. He has received numerous foundation grants and federal grants from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and the National Institutes of Health. In 2005, he was awarded a prestigious Robert Wood Johnson Investigator Award in Health Policy Research to assess cohort effects on the health of Mexican immigrants to the U.S.

Dr. Escarce is a member of the Congressional Budget Office’s Panel of Health Advisers and the U.S. Census Bureau’s Advisory Committee on the Hispanic Population. He previously served on the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ National Advisory Council for Health Care Policy, Research, and Evaluation. He has also been very active in the National Academies, serving on the Institute of Medicine Committee (IOM) on the National Quality Report on Health Care Delivery, the IOM Committee on Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care, and the National Research Council Panel on Hispanics in the U.S., among others. He currently serves on the IOM Board on Population Health and Public Health Practice and the IOM Roundtable on Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health.

A member of AcademyHealth (and AHSR) for 20 years, Dr. Escarce has served on the planning committee and has organized sessions for the Annual Research Meeting several times, and he currently serves on the AcademyHealth Methods Council.
He is Co-Editor-in-Chief of Health Services Research, one of the official journals of AcademyHealth.