Robert Berenson, M.D., is an Institute Fellow at the Urban Institute. He is an expert in health care policy, particularly Medicare, with experience practicing medicine, serving in senior positions in two Administrations, and helping organize and manage a successful preferred provider organization. From 1998-2000, he was in charge of Medicare payment policy and private health plan contracting in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Previously, he served as an Assistant Director of the Carter White House Domestic Policy Staff and recently was a member of the Obama transition team. Effective July 2009, Dr. Berenson became a Commissioner of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC). In July 2010, he became vice chair of MedPAC.

Dr. Berenson is a board-certified internist who practiced for twenty years, the last twelve in a Washington, D.C. group practice, and is Fellow of the American College of Physicians. He helped organize and manage a successful preferred provider organization serving the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. He was co-author, with Walter Zelman, of The Managed Care Blues & How to Cure Them, published in 1998, and, with Rick Mayes, Medicare Payment Policy and the Shaping of U.S. Health Care in 2006. He is a graduate of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and on the faculty at the George Washington University Schools of Medicine and Public Health and the Fuqua School of Business at Duke.