RxEconomics Logo - Health Economics and Outcomes Research Consultancy specializing in AI-driven analytics

Health Economics Expert Witness & Litigation Support

When your case turns on healthcare economics, you need an expert who can dissect complex economic issues and present findings clearly and credibly. RxEconomics provides health economics expert witness and litigation support services to attorneys and law firms nationwide—in pharmaceutical litigation, insurance and reimbursement disputes, healthcare antitrust matters, and policy challenges.

Your expert is Dr. M. Christopher Roebuck, PhD, MBA—a health economist with 28+ years of experience, 120+ publications & research reports, and peer-reviewed work in Health Affairs, Medical Care, and the American Economic Review. We pair that peer-reviewed rigor with AI-accelerated analytics, so you get defensible economic evidence at litigation speed—typically 3× faster than traditional consultancies, with a response within one business day.

Expert Witness Capabilities

Expert Reports & Testimony

Dr. Roebuck provides expert reports, testimony, and litigation consulting support in healthcare damages, reimbursement, claims-based economic analysis, and rebuttal settings—explaining complex economic concepts in accessible terms. He is available to testify when the matter requires it.

Economic Damages Analysis

We quantify economic losses using methods drawn from the peer-reviewed health economics literature, so your damages figure rests on defensible science rather than advocacy.

Attributable-Cost Modeling

We isolate the healthcare costs attributable to a specific product, practice, or policy from the costs that would have occurred anyway—the core empirical question in most healthcare damages disputes.

Claims-Based Damages

We build damages models directly from healthcare claims data—commercial, Medicare, and Medicaid—leveraging the same datasets and methods that power our real-world evidence and claims analytics practice.

Drug-Pricing Economics

We analyze pharmaceutical pricing, rebates, and formulary economics, grounded in Dr. Roebuck's published research on prescription drug innovation and affordability.

Rebuttal of Opposing Experts

We replicate, stress-test, and critique opposing experts' analyses, identifying the assumptions, coding choices, and statistical shortcuts that do not survive scrutiny.

Support Across the Litigation Lifecycle

We work alongside your legal team from early case assessment through expert reports, rebuttal analysis, deposition preparation, and testimony support—with analytical rigor that withstands scrutiny at every stage.

  • Discovery & Data Strategy. We help you identify the healthcare datasets that matter, frame targeted data requests, and assess what opposing productions can and cannot support.
  • Expert Report Development. We design the study, run the analysis, and draft a clear, fully documented expert report with transparent methods, code lists, and sensitivity analyses.
  • Deposition & Trial Preparation. We prepare exhibits, anticipate cross-examination themes, and brief your team on the economic strengths and vulnerabilities of both sides' positions.
  • Rebuttal Analysis. We dissect opposing expert reports—replicating their models where data permit—and document where their methods depart from accepted practice.
  • Testimony. Dr. Roebuck presents findings in plain language, translating econometrics into narratives that finders of fact can follow and trust.

How We Estimate Attributable Costs From Claims Data

Most healthcare damages questions reduce to a comparison between the world as it happened and the but-for world—what utilization and spending would have looked like absent the conduct, product, or policy at issue. Estimating that difference credibly is the discipline of attributable-cost analysis, where we have spent nearly three decades.

The naive approach—comparing average costs between exposed and unexposed patients—almost always fails, because patients are not randomly assigned to exposure. Sicker patients use more of nearly everything, so simple comparisons confound the effect of interest with underlying differences in health status. Defensible attributable-cost estimation starts with careful cohort construction from the claims: precise definitions of exposure using NDC, ICD-10, CPT, and HCPCS codes; an index date and washout period to distinguish new from ongoing exposure; and continuous-enrollment criteria so that observed costs reflect complete claims capture rather than gaps in coverage.

From there, the method must address selection. Depending on the data and the question, we apply propensity-score matching or weighting to balance observable characteristics, generalized linear models suited to the skewed distribution of healthcare costs, difference-in-differences designs that net out background trends, and individual fixed-effects panel models that control for stable unobserved differences across patients by comparing each patient with themselves over time. Dr. Roebuck's fixed-effects analyses of medication adherence and healthcare spending—published in Health Affairs and Medical Care—are widely cited applications of this approach in the health economics literature, and the same designs translate directly to litigation settings.

Finally, a damages-ready estimate is a tested estimate. We probe every result with sensitivity analyses—alternative cohort definitions, alternative model specifications, alternative cost-trimming rules—and report how the estimate moves. When an attributable-cost figure is stable across reasonable analytic choices, it is far harder to attack; when it is fragile, you need to know before the other side does. Either way, you walk into deposition understanding exactly what the number can and cannot support.

Building Claims-Based Damages Analyses That Withstand Daubert

Under Daubert and Federal Rule of Evidence 702, expert testimony must rest on reliable principles and methods, reliably applied. Claims-based economic analyses often fail that standard for predictable, avoidable reasons—and we design every engagement to avoid them.

First, the methods themselves must be testable and accepted. We use study designs and statistical techniques that are standard in the peer-reviewed health economics and pharmacoepidemiology literature—the same methods journals require of published research. Because Dr. Roebuck has published extensively using these techniques, he can testify not merely that a method is accepted, but that he has applied it under peer review.

Second, the application must be transparent and reproducible. Every RxEconomics analysis is built so that another qualified analyst, given the same data, could replicate it: documented code lists for every diagnosis, procedure, and drug definition; explicit inclusion and exclusion criteria; and a complete analytic audit trail from raw claims to final estimate. Opacity is a reliability problem—and a cross-examination problem—so we eliminate it by design.

Third, the analysis must confront known sources of error rather than hope they go unnoticed. Claims-based studies have well-documented pitfalls: selection bias when exposed and unexposed groups differ systematically, immortal time bias when study design guarantees survival during part of follow-up, prevalent-user bias when long-term users are mistaken for typical ones, and extrapolation beyond the population or period the data actually cover. These same pitfalls are where opposing experts most often stumble, which is why our rebuttal work begins by replicating the opposing model and testing how its conclusions shift when questionable assumptions are corrected.

The result is economic evidence engineered for admissibility: methods with a published pedigree, applications an opposing expert can verify but not undermine, and error rates quantified rather than concealed.

Examples of Engagements

We treat litigation engagements as confidential and describe them only in anonymized, matter-type terms. Representative matter types include:

  • Pharmaceutical pricing disputes
  • PBM contract and rebate disputes
  • Insurer reimbursement disputes
  • Claims-based damages analyses
  • Class certification and common-impact analyses
  • Healthcare antitrust and market-definition questions
  • Product liability damages and attributable-cost modeling
  • Rebuttal of opposing healthcare economics experts

Your Expert: Dr. M. Christopher Roebuck, PhD, MBA

Dr. Roebuck is President & CEO of RxEconomics, the boutique health economics consultancy he founded in 2011. Over a 28+ year career spanning academia, industry, and consulting—including service as Director of Strategic Research at CVS Caremark—he has built a research record of 120+ publications & research reports, with peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Health Affairs, Medical Care, the American Journal of Managed Care, and the American Economic Review. His scholarly record is independently verifiable through his Google Scholar and ORCID profiles, and his full background is detailed on our About page.

That record matters in court. Dr. Roebuck's opinions draw on the same econometric and biostatistical techniques he has published and defended in the scientific literature for nearly three decades, and his experience spans expert reports, testimony, and litigation consulting support.

Selected Peer-Reviewed Publications

  • Roebuck MC, Liberman JN. Impact of Pharmacy Benefit Design on Prescription Drug Utilization: A Fixed Effects Analysis. Health Services Research. 2009.
  • Roebuck MC, Liberman JN, Gemmill-Toyama M, Brennan TA. Medication Adherence Leads To Lower Health Care Use And Costs Despite Increased Drug Spending. Health Affairs. 2011.
  • Ketcham JD, Lucarelli C, Miravete EJ, Roebuck MC. Sinking, Swimming, or Learning to Swim in Medicare Part D. American Economic Review. 2012.
  • Roebuck MC, Kaestner RJ, Dougherty JS. Impact of Medication Adherence on Health Services Utilization in Medicaid. Medical Care. 2018.
  • Lo Sasso AT, Roebuck MC. The Price of Progress: Understanding Innovation and Affordability of Prescription Drugs. The American Journal of Managed Care. 2024.

Frequently Asked Questions

A health economics expert witness applies economic theory and statistical methods to questions of liability and damages in healthcare disputes—quantifying economic losses, estimating costs attributable to a product or practice, analyzing pricing and market dynamics, and explaining those findings through expert reports and testimony. Dr. Roebuck provides each of these services, along with critical evaluation of opposing experts’ methodologies.

We select the method to fit the question and the data: attributable-cost modeling, difference-in-differences and fixed-effects panel designs, propensity-score matching, generalized linear cost models, and but-for scenario modeling, among others. All are standard techniques in the peer-reviewed health economics literature—the foundation of a reliable, admissible opinion.

We support high-stakes healthcare matters including pharmaceutical litigation, insurance and reimbursement disputes, drug-pricing and PBM matters, class certification analyses, healthcare market definition and competition analyses, and healthcare policy challenges. We are available to both plaintiffs and defendants, and our conclusions follow the evidence.

We design for admissibility from day one: methods drawn from the peer-reviewed literature, transparent and reproducible applications with documented code lists and audit trails, and quantified sensitivity analyses in place of unexamined assumptions. Dr. Roebuck has published extensively using the same techniques he applies in litigation, which allows him to testify to their acceptance from direct experience.

In litigation, the most decisive data are often case-specific: claims extracts, pricing files, and other productions obtained in discovery, which we assess, reconstruct, and analyze directly. We pair those with the commercial, Medicare, and Medicaid claims databases and other real-world data sources detailed in our real-world evidence and claims analytics practice, matching the dataset to the question your case presents.

Our AI-enhanced workflow typically delivers results 3× faster than traditional consultancies—a decisive advantage under court deadlines—while senior-level review of every analysis ensures exceptional accuracy. Engagements begin with a confidential conflicts check and scoping call with Dr. Roebuck, and we respond to new inquiries within one business day.

Retain a Health Economics Expert Witness

Whether you are evaluating a potential claim, preparing an expert report, or rebutting opposing testimony, we bring the economic evidence—and the expert—your case needs. Contact us for a confidential consultation and conflicts check; we respond within one business day. For the broader analytical foundation behind our litigation work, explore our health economics and outcomes research services and our perspective on AI in HEOR today.

Request Your Consult