Law Commons^™

The Positive Case For Centralization In Health Care Regulation: The Federalism Failures Of The Aca, Abigail R. Moncrieff, Eric Lee

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Although the ACA accomplishes significantly greater centralization of authority for healthcare regulation, it falls far short of the full centralization that seems functionally justified. There is no doubt that the states have played an important role in healthcare regulation throughout the nation's history, but that role is becoming increasingly irrelevant as healthcare regulation becomes increasingly technocratic—i.e., increasingly objectivist and data-driven. The ACA is a step in the right direction, but the U.S. should further centralize authority over healthcare.

The Supreme Court’S Assault On Litigation: Why (And How) It Could Be Good For Health Law, Abigail R. Moncrieff

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

In recent years, the Supreme Court has narrowed or eliminated private rights of action in many legal regimes, much to the chagrin of the legal academy. That trend, although certainly not limited to health law, has had a significant impact on the field; the Court's decisions have eliminated the private enforcement mechanism for at least three important healthcare regimes: Medicaid, employer-sponsored insurance, and medical devices. In a similar trend outside the courts, state legislatures have capped non-economic and punitive damages for medical malpractice litigation, weakening the tort system's deterrent capacity in those states. This Article suggests that the trend of …

Federalization Snowballs: The Need For National Action In Medical Malpractice Reform, Abigail R. Moncrieff

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Because tort law and healthcare regulation are traditional state functions and because medical, legal, and insurance practices are localized, legal scholars have long believed that medical malpractice falls within the states' exclusive jurisdiction and sovereignty. This conventional view fails to consider the impact that federal healthcare programs have on the states' incentives to regulate. As a result of federal financing, each state externalizes some of the costs of its malpractice policy onto the federal government. The federal government therefore needs to take charge of medical malpractice in order to fix the spillover problem created by existing federal healthcare programs.

Importantly, …

Payments To Medicaid Doctors: Interpreting The “Equal Access” Provision, Abigail R. Moncrieff

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This Comment analyzes the circuit split that has arisen as courts have confronted challenges to Medicaid payments. Part I provides background on the Medicaid program and the circuit split, and it identifies and explicates two competing rules for measuring adequacy of Medicaid payments: the Fifth and Seventh circuits' "access metric" and the Ninth Circuit's "cost metric." Parts II and III identify problems with these two rules, and criticizes them as inconsistent with the statute's text, purpose, and intent. Part IV proposes a new rule, an "MCO metric," and explains why that rule is the best interpretation of Medicaid's reimbursement provision.