Erin Duffy’s (she/her) interest in tackling big policy failures can be traced back to bedbugs.
After graduating from college, Duffy was a case manager at Catholic Charities in Boston, where she helped refugees from Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries get settled in the U.S. Those refugees’ transitions were filled with hardship: People routinely lost heat, faced eviction, or were disenrolled from welfare benefits or Medicaid. Some had to have their rooms fumigated for bedbugs — Duffy aiding with laundry.
“I found myself so frustrated because I was solving the same problem over and over again,” Duffy said. “It was like this constant fire alarm.”
She went back to school to study health care policy. She gravitated toward affordability, trying to understand how health care costs can drive millions of people into a financial hole. In particular, her Ph.D. work was focused on surprise medical bills — something “everybody’s mad about,” she said — right before Congress drafted the No Surprises Act in 2019.
Duffy has since become a leading expert on surprise medical bills and debt at the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics, and has expanded into other areas. She recently co-published a secret shopper study to understand how easy it was for people to call hospitals and get payment plan estimates for planned procedures. (It wasn’t easy.)
Duffy is gratified she is able to research issues that not only are important to people’s day-to-day lives, but are leading to actual reform. “That gives me a lot of hope,” she said.
— Bob Herman
