Merrill Matthews, Ph.D., was for 25 years a resident scholar with the Institute for Policy Innovation. He is a public policy analyst specializing in health care, entitlements, and energy issues and is the author of numerous public policy studies. He is past president of the Health Economics Roundtable for the National Association for Business Economics, the largest trade association of business economists.

Dr. Matthews served for 10 years as a medical ethicist for the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center’s Institutional Review Board for Human Experimentation. He is the co-author of On the Edge: America Faces the Entitlements Cliff (2019) and has contributed chapters to several books, including Physician Assisted Suicide: Expanding the Debate, The 21st Century Health Care Leader and, in 2009, Stop Paying the Crooks (on Medicare fraud). And for several years he co-authored a column on dental ethics for the Texas Dental Journal.

He also served as chairman of the Texas Advisory Committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

He is a weekly columnist for The Hill and has been published in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Forbes, USA Today and the Washington Times. In 2008 and again in 2014, the BBC invited him to star in a program on welfare reform in Great Britain, specifically Wales.

Dr. Matthews received a BBA in Economics from the University of Texas at Arlington, an M.Div. from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and has a Ph.D. in Humanities from the University of Texas at Dallas. And he is an 8th degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do. And he can be reached at: MerrillMatthewsPhD@gmail.com.