Debra J. Lipson
Senior Researcher

Debra Lipson, a senior researcher at Mathematica, has more than 25 years of experience as a health policy researcher and analyst at the local, state, national, and international levels. She has expertise in state health policy, Medicaid financing issues, the delivery and quality of long-term care services, and state programs to cover the uninsured.

Lipson recently directed a study for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, comparing states Medicaid program spending efficiency and exploring factors that explain state variation in costs in relation to quality for Medicaid populations. She is also a principal investigator for an evaluation of the federal Money Follows the Person Demonstration, which is assessing state success in relocating long-term institutionalized Medicaid beneficiaries to home- and community-based settings. She recently led a mixed-methods evaluation of Maine’s DirigoChoice program, which assessed the sustainability and replicability of its financing strategy for subsidizing health insurance coverage.

Over her career, Lipson has held senior research positions at several Washington, DC, organizations, including the Institute for the Future of Aging Services, the Alpha Center, and the Intergovernmental Health Policy Project at George Washington University. From 1997 to 2002, she worked as a health policy analyst at the World Health Organization in Geneva, where she studied international trade in health services, the effects of global trade rules on national health policy, and the effects of poverty reduction efforts on health. She has published widely in peer-reviewed journals and serves as a reviewer for Health Affairs and the Gerontologist. Lipson holds a master’s in health services administration from the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan.

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