Lina Walker, PhD
Vice President, Health Security
AREAS OF EXPERTISE
Medicare and health care financing
ABOUT
Lina Walker serves as the vice president of health security in AARP’s Public Policy Institute, where she leads a team of senior health policy and health services researchers. She has spent nearly 20 years conducting research and publishing on health care and retirement issues. Walker’s recent work includes analyzing Medicare reform proposals and their effect on beneficiaries and Medicare’s long-term financial status. In addition, she has worked on issues related to the financing of Social Security and Medicaid, private pension reform, long-term care financing, and health and long-term care insurance.
Before joining AARP, Walker was the research director at the Retirement Security Project, a joint project between the Brookings Institution and Georgetown University, and she was a research assistant professor at Georgetown Public Policy Institute. Previously, she worked at the Congressional Budget Office, where she modeled the effects of rising disability rates on the Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid programs. Her work also included projecting the long-term financial status of the Medicare and Social Security trust fund. Early in her career, she worked at the Office of Policy Analysis of the Maryland General Assembly, where she provided staff support to Maryland’s state legislators and analyzed the effects of health and long-term care proposals on the state’s budget and consumers.
Walker serves on several expert panels at the National Quality Forum and is a fellow at the National Academy of Social Insurance. She has written and presented on a broad range of health and retirement issues.
Walker has a PhD in economics from the University of Michigan.
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
- Do Defaults and Longevity Annuities Improve Annuity Take-Up Rates: Results from an Experiment
- The Importance of Social Security and Medicare
- State Variation in Access to Medicaid HCBS and Nursing Home Services: A 50-State Survey of Financial Eligibility Standards
Read Lina Walker's blog posts.
CONTACT
For media inquiries, call 202-434-2560 or e-mail media@aarp.org.