Benjamin C. Silver

Benjamin Silver is a Senior Economist and Director of the Payment Model Analytics (PMA) program in RTI's Center for Health Care Financing and Payment. He conducts quantitative and qualitative analyses of large-scale, government-funded health policy and health services evaluations and demonstrations. With an academic grounding in health services research and economics, he is an expert in Medicare and post-acute care payment policy.

Dr. Silver has led or contributed to several research efforts for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE), and the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC). Most recently, he led RTI’s work for CMS and ASPE developing a prototype for a Unified PAC Prospective Payment System. This work, which was required by the IMPACT Act of 2014, aimed to construct a payment framework that could be used across PAC settings and that would set payment based on beneficiary clinical characteristics rather than type of provider. It culminated in a highly anticipated Report to Congress published in 2022. He is also actively involved in several ongoing projects for the CMS, including the annual recalibration of risk adjustment models for Medicare Parts C and D and the alternative payment models Comprehensive Primary Care Plus and Primary Care First.

Dr. Silver rejoined RTI in 2017 after earning his doctorate in Health Services Research from the Brown University School of Public Health. He previously worked at RTI as a Health Policy Analyst in the Aging, Disability, and Long-Term Care program. He has held faculty appointments at Brown University and at Wheaton College, where he taught an undergraduate course in U.S. Public Health Policy.