In 1983, he founded the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA), a think tank that was the source of such policy ideas as Health Savings Accounts, Roth IRAs, automatic employer enrollment in 401(k) plans and allowing seniors to continue working without penalty after they begin receiving Social Security benefits.

[citation needed] He is author and co-author of 15 books and more than 50 published studies on such topics as health policy, tax reform and school choice.

[9] He attended college at the University of Texas in Austin, where he became involved in campus politics and was elected vice president of the student body.

The following year he lost the race for president to Lloyd Doggett, who later served as a senior Democratic member of the House of Representatives.

Among the faculty who gave him guidance were three Nobel Prize winners – Robert Mundell, Edmund Phelps and William Vickrey.

As the term "neoclassical" suggests, the dissertation used marginal analysis—which was a radical departure from the voting models favored by public choice theorists James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock and their followers, on the one hand, and University of Chicago economist George Stigler's "regulatory capture" theory, on the other.

With his colleague Phil Porter, Goodman published three articles extending the theory to the fields of regulation,[11] the production of public goods,[12] and welfare economics.

[13] Their article on regulation won the prestigious Duncan Black Prize awarded by the Public Choice Society in 1989.

Goodman not only showed that the neoclassical approach realistically models stable political systems, he also identified what an equilibrium must look like.

Furthermore, Goodman and Porter discovered that small differences in political prices lead to large welfare losses for society as a whole—much larger, for example, than what we would ordinarily expect to find in the private sector.

The dominant view at the time was adherence to managed care, under which decisions are made by experts, typically following formal practice guidelines.

[22] Even so, the book won praise from people in and out of government and across the political spectrum—including Peter Orszag, who was chief economist for President Barack Obama at the time.

The idea was first introduced to the public policy community in Patient Power, but HSAs were initially opposed by every major health and business lobby.

Further, they showed that a Roth HSA, with after-tax deposits and tax free withdraws, is the right account to combine with the credit.

Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman, the editors of The Wall Street Journal and many others credited Goodman and his coauthors with the change, citing NCPA studies and its communications efforts as the primary reasons for the policy reversal.

In Characteristics of an Ideal Health Care System, he identified ten ways in which government policies were creating the very problems many reformers want to solve.

In the Journal of Legal Medicine, he argued for a do-no-harm approach—under which government policies that are causing problems would be repealed and replaced before any other reforms are considered.

[34] The legislative version Archived 2018-09-19 at the Wayback Machine of the McCain approach was introduced by Tom Coburn and Richard Burr in the Senate and Paul Ryan and Devon Nunes in the House of Representatives.

[35] For example, the first problem is that people are being required to buy a health plan whose cost is expected to grow at twice the rate of growth of their income.

[36] Beginning in 2015, Goodman helped House Rules Committee Chairman Pete Sessions (R-TX) and Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) develop a replacement plan Archived 2018-02-24 at the Wayback Machine for Obamacare.

In a post at the Health Affairs Blog, Sessions, Cassidy and Goodman argue that their plan is not only better than Obamacare, it would create universal coverage.

He organized the first report card on public schools in the United States—ranking them based on the performance of students on standardized tests.

In response, NCPA board member Pat Rooney started the first private voucher program, leading to many similar efforts across the country.

These ideas included the Roth IRA and allowing seniors to keep working beyond the retirement age without losing their Social Security benefits—ideas that later became law.

[9] With Peter Orszag (then at the Brookings Institution), Goodman helped reform the 401(k) law so that employers can now automatically enroll their employees in plans with diversified portfolios.

[42] Buckley and Goodman were joined by such debating partners as former Delaware Governor Pete du Pont, former Treasury Secretary Pete Peterson, Senator Phil Gramm, economist Thomas Sowell and California Governor Jerry Brown (arguing for the flat tax).

The opposing sides included former presidential candidate George McGovern, Senator Jay Rockefeller, MIT economist Lester Thurow, Nobel Laurate Kenneth Arrow and TV commentator Susan Estrich.