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Ruth Waitzberg

Research Fellow (external)

Biography

Ruth is a senior researcher at the Technical University of Berlin. She is also a researcher scholar since 2010 at the Economics and Health Policy Team, at the Myers-JDC-Brookdale Institute. Her work focuses on health financing, policy evaluation, health and long-term care systems, cross-country comparisons, health systems responses to shocks, and global health.

Ruth has worked in collaboration with policymakers both brokering knowledge from the world to Israel and Ukraine and from Israel to the world. Ruth has won competitive grants for independent studies. She holds a joint PhD from the Technical University of Berlin and Ben Gurion University of the Negev, an MA in public policy and a BA in sociology, anthropology and political science both from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. 

Publication highlights

  1. Brammli-Greenberg, S., Glazer, J., & Waitzberg, R. (2019). Modest risk-sharing significantly reduces health plans’ incentives for service distortion. The European Journal of Health Economics, 1-16. DOI 10.1007/s10198-019-01102-w
  2. Waitzberg R, Schmidt, A., Blümel, M. et al. (2020), Mapping variability in allocation of Long-Term Care funds across payer agencies in OECD countries. Health Policy https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthpol.2020.02.013
  3. Waitzberg, R., Davidovitch, N., Leibner, G., Penn, N., & Brammli-Greenberg, S. (2020). Israel’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic: tailoring measures for vulnerable cultural minority populations. International Journal for Equity in Health, 19(1), 1-5. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12939-020-01191-7
  4. Rosen, B., Waitzberg, R. & Israeli, A. Israel’s rapid rollout of vaccinations for COVID-19. Isr J Health Policy Res 10, 6 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13584-021-00440-6
  5. Waitzberg, R., Quentin, W., Webb, E. and Glied, S. (2021) The Structure and Financing of Health Care Systems Affected How Providers Coped with COVID-19. The Milbank Quarterly. DOI:10.1111/1468-0009.12530 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-0009.12530
  6. Waitzberg R, Gottlieb N, Quentin W, Busse R, Greenberg D (2021). Dual agency in hospitals: what strategies do managers and physicians apply to reconcile dilemmas between clinical and economic considerations? Int J Health Policy Manag. doi:10.34172/ijhpm.2021.87
  7. Waitzberg, R., Gerkens, S., Vrangbæk, K. Van Ginneken, E., et al (2021) “Balancing financial incentives during COVID-19: a comparison of provider payment adjustments across 20 countries”, Health Policy – invited paper for special issue. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthpol.2021.09.015 
  8. Waitzberg, R., Hernandez-Quevedo, C., Bernal-Delgado, E., et al (2021) “Early health system responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in Mediterranean countries: A tale of successes and challenges”, Health Policy – invited paper for special issue. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthpol.2021.10.007
  9. Waitzberg, R., Siegel, M., Quentin, W., Busse, R., & Greenberg, D. (2022) “It probably worked: A Bayesian approach to evaluating the introduction of activity-based hospital payment in Israel”. Israel Journal of Health Policy Research. 11, 8. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13584-022-00515-y 
  10. Rosenthal. A, and Waitzberg, R. (2022) “The challenges brought by the COVID-19 pandemic to health systems exposed pre-existing gaps”. Editorial of the special issue: SI: COVID-19 health policies in middle- and low-income countries, Edited by Ruth Waitzberg and Anat Rosenthal. Health Policy Open, doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hpopen.2022.100088
  11. Maoz-Breuer, R., Waitzberg, R., Breuer, A. et.al (2023) Work like a Doc: A comparison of regulations on residents' working hours in 14 high-income countries. Health Policy https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthpol.2023.104753
  12. Waitzberg, R., Pfundstein, I., Maresso, A. et al. Health system description and assessment: a scoping review of templates for systematic analyses. Health Res Policy Sys 22, 82 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12961-024-01166-y  
  13. Thomas Rice, Ruth Waitzberg, Andres Võrk (2025) Is health financing fair? Evidence from 29 countries on the progressivity of health care revenue collection. Health Policy https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthpol.2025.105429
  14. Orduhan, C., Waitzberg, R., De Allegri, M. et al. Association between self-reported gender-based discrimination and maternal mortality rates: results of an ecological multi-level analysis across nine countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. BMC Public Health 25, 3550 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-025-24861-z  

 

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