It saddens me to convey that Cato Institute adjunct scholar and my friend Shirley Svorny passed away October 20 from multiple myeloma. Shirley was less than two weeks shy of her 71st birthday.
Shirley Viola Svorny entered the world in Los Angeles and earned her bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Her dissertation sought to “explain why U.S. policy makers diverged from their usual policy to allow unrestricted migration [of foreign-trained physicians] from 1965 to 1980.” Without liberalization, “the unprecedented expansion in health care expenditures” that followed the creation of Medicare and Medicaid “may have led to severe queues or price hikes” that would have angered consumers. Shirley found evidence that liberalization increased the supply of physicians and reduced prices for physician services. She argued that domestic physicians temporarily yielded to liberalization because “in order for physicians to maximize their long-run earnings, they must avoid actions that would cause consumers to put pressure on the government to repeal some of the legislation that currently protects physicians from competition.”
From 1978 to 2013, Shirley was a professor of economics at California State University, Northridge, where she taught health, labor, and urban economics. She took leaves of absence during the 1980s to do economic analysis for Getty Oil and Security Pacific National Bank. In 1996, she founded CSUN’s San Fernando Valley Economic Research Center and served as its director for four years. From 2003 to 2009, she served as chair of the economics department at CSUN. After 2013, she switched to professor emerita status.
Shirley’s work first marched under the Cato banner in 1994 when she and husband Robert C. Krol coauthored a Cato Journal article presenting evidence that state banking, trucking, and labor regulations had “negative employment and output effects.” In 2004, the duo explained in Cato’s Regulation magazine that moral hazard led to the insolvency and collapse of the government-run Los Angeles Community Development Bank. Given what happened a few years later, perhaps more federal officials should have read that article. Given their conclusion—“Loans are not welfare”— federal officials should still read it now.
Shirley was a Cato adjunct scholar for 14-plus years. I forget exactly when we recruited her. During that period, her Cato work focused almost exclusively on health policy. She was the bane of the physician lobby. Her first Cato study argued not for tweaking or liberalizing government licensing of clinicians but completely eliminating it. (You would think the physician lobby would want to be rid of the regulations that bind them. You would be wrong, because those regulations bind incumbent physicians’ competitors even more.) Her next Cato study pierced physician-friendly myths about the medical malpractice insurance industry and argued that capping damages in med mal cases (as the physician lobby advocates) would reduce quality and expose patients to harm. Two years before anyone had heard of Covid-19, Shirley authored a study arguing for removing regulatory barriers to telehealth and made the case for liberalizing telehealth alongside U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz (D‑HI) at a briefing on Capitol Hill. After Covid hit, she and I coauthored a study arguing that Covid-19 demonstrates that clinician licensing reduces access to medical care; we presented alternatives to monopolistic certification of clinician categories and quality. Shirley’s last Cato byline drew from her second: it argued against the “incredibly naïve” calls for a taxpayer-funded Municipal Bank of Los Angeles.
Shirley was a genuinely generous and kind person, with an inquisitive, sharp, and therefore humble mind. She had a delightfully disarming way of showing that economic liberty is not radical but reasonable. Years ago, in a public forum, an advisor to the Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives drawled at her, “Are you telling me the solution to Texas’ problems is doctors from Vermont?” Shirley quietly explained, in a way that left him nowhere to go, that Texas had nothing to fear and everything to gain from allowing competition. I loved putting her in front of audiences.
Shirley fought multiple myeloma for more than seven years, even participating in a clinical trial. I was glad to hear she was happy with the care she received; she loved to surprise managed-care skeptics by sharing her positive experiences with Kaiser Permanente. Though weak, she attended her daughter’s wedding this September.
Before she died, Shirley told her husband and frequent coauthor of 35 years, “My life was complete.” She had a happy marriage, raised two great kids, had a career she loved, and got to communicate economic ideas through academic journals, newspapers, and everything in between. I witnessed her love for applying economic ideas to improve people’s lives. She delighted in news about my children and in sharing news about her own.
I want to keep adding to this tribute because I don’t want it to end. Like I don’t want my collaboration and friendship with Shirley to end.
Rest in peace.
