<p>Miriam J. Laugesen, PhD&nbsp;is an Associate Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. She is the author of Fixing Medical Prices: How Physicians are Paid, (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2016). Fixing Medical Prices goes to the heart of the U.S. medical pricing process: to a largely unknown yet influential committee of medical organizations affiliated with the American Medical Association that advises Medicare. Medicare's ready acceptance of the committee’s recommendations has broad implications, because it sets off a chain reaction of pricing physician services across most public insurance programs and private insurers. She is a past recipient of a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award in Health Policy Research.</p>