Maggie Mahar is a fellow at The Century Foundation and the author of Money-Driven Medicine: The Real Reason Health Care Costs So Much (Harper/Collins 2006) and Bull! A History of the Boom, 1982–1999 (Harper/Collins, 2003), a book that Warren Buffett recommended in Berkshire Hathaway’s annual report.

Before beginning to specialize in health care, Mahar was a financial journalist. She has written for Institutional Investor, The New York Times, and Barron’s, where she served first as senior writer and then as senior editor from the late eighties through the late nineties. There, she covered Wall Street, Washington, and social policy as well as markets and politics in Russia, Japan, and the Middle East. After leaving Barron’s, she wrote a column about international markets and economics for Bloomberg.

Before becoming a journalist, Maggie Mahar was an English professor at Yale University, from which she holds a B.A. and a Ph.D. in English literature. She lives in Manhattan where she continues to blog and write about health care.

This spring, her cover story in Dartmouth Medicine took a critical look at Medicare spending—and how Medicare reform could pave the way for health care reform—while on thehealthcareblog.com, her review of “Sicko” stirred controversy. On the same site, she has discussed whether non-profit hospitals deserve their tax breaks.