Health Economics

[healthecon]

Hello All,

I am currently faced with a brutal decision between pursuing a PhD in Population health (health services research) at the University of Wisconsin (madison) or Economics at University of Colorado Boulder.  Both programs have offered me full funding and approx ~$20k stipend through a research assistantship (wisconsin) and a teaching assistantship (boulder).  Boulder has also offered a 5k fellowship.

My goal is to ultimately be an academic health economist with a specialization in public insurance.  I like the idea of having economics training, particularly since it is more general and will allow me to pursue other areas, but the training in health research might be better at wisconsin, which has very notable health economists in their faculty.  Boulder is a clear choice for living.  Boulder also has good public economists, and I could work A LOT with the faculty in the school of public health in denver who are awesome.  I'd probably rather do a project assistantship over a teaching assistantship, but don't know how that would look when applying for academia.  I was trained as an undergraduate in Economics at the University of Chicago...  

I'm planning to visit next week before making a decision.  Still, I wanted to see what people here think.

Thanks!