Law Commons^™

The Cash Nexus, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

Courts and legislatures have labored for decades to protect patients' choice of medical treatments, even though patients seize that gift less eagerly than lawmakers expect. Yet while courts have rushed to build the whited sepulchre of informed consent, they have fled from a related problem that patients actually yearn to solve and that actually can be ameliorated the plight of patients who perforce agree to a treatment before they know its costs and who receive a bill both unrelated to the treatment's value and several times what an insured patient would pay. Increasingly, patients must be consumers in the medical …

The Health Insurance Debate In Canada: Lessons For The United States?, Mary Anne Bobinski

Faculty Articles

This Essay begins with an intentionally ambiguous title. Are comparisons to Canada relevant and useful for policy-makers in the United States and, if so, what lessons can we learn? Part II of this Essay highlights some of the risks and benefits of cross-border comparisons between the United States and Canada. In Part III, I analyze some of the key data points often cited in comparing the two health care systems. Part IV explores the current Canadian debate about private health insurance. Finally, in Part V, I focus on the lessons from Canada for the health insurance debate in the United …

The Massachusetts Health Plan: Public Insurance For The Poor, Private Insurance For The Wealthy, Self-Insurance For The Rest?, Timothy Stoltzfus Jost

Scholarly Articles

No abstract provided.

Shifting Risk Of Ruin To Consumers: The Role Of Tax Law In American Health Policy, Timothy Stoltzfus Jost

Scholarly Articles

No abstract provided.

The American Right-Wing Policy Agenda, Timothy Stoltzfus Jost

Scholarly Articles

Right-wing health policy is alive and well in the United States. Pro-business and libertarian health policy advocacy groups, generously funded by right-wing foundations (and, in some instances, by the health care industry), produce a continuous stream of press releases, policy-statements, books, articles, and symposia, as well as testimony before legislative and administrative bodies. Their positions are taken very seriously by the American media, who make certain that right-wing policy experts are represented in any discussion of current health policy issues.

The Health Care Choice Act: The Individual Insurance Market And The Politics Of 'Choice', Elizabeth Pendo

All Faculty Scholarship

Traditionally, employer-sponsored group insurance plans have been the backbone of health insurance coverage in the United States. While it is still true that most Americans get their health insurance through their employment, the erosion of employer-sponsored health insurance has increased the ranks of the uninsured and pushed more workers, retirees and their families into the individual insurance market. In 2005, for example, nine percent of the population, or nearly 27 million people, turned to individual policies for health insurance coverage.

The Health Care Choice Act of 2005 (the "Act") currently before Congress aims to reform perceived problems in the individual …

Book Review: Reviewing Susan Starr Sered And Rushike Fernandopulle, Uninsured In America (2007), Elizabeth Pendo

All Faculty Scholarship

Book Review of Susan Starr Sered and Rushike Fernandopulle, Uninsured in America (2007).

Tackling The “Evils” Of Interlocking Directorates In Healthcare Nonprofits, Nicole Huberfeld

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The nonprofit sector and matters of nonprofit governance have been in the national spotlight much of late. One area of heightened interest is directors of healthcare entities regularly serving on the board of more than one healthcare organization. Even when board membership of related entities is relatively independent, one corporation's business plan frequently is affected (or even controlled) by the business needs of a separately incorporated parent, affiliate, or other related organization. Very little case law addresses "interlocking" directorates for nonprofit board members, and the case law that does exist tends to address narrow, fact-based state law interpretive issues rather …

Does Nonprofit Ownership Matter?, Jill R. Horwitz

Articles

In recent years, policymakers have increasingly questioned whether nonprofit institutions, particularly hospitals, merit tax exemption. They argue that nonprofit hospitals differ little from their for-profit counterparts in the provision of charity care and, therefore, should either lose their tax-exempt status or adhere to new, strict, and specific requirements to provide free services for the poor. In this Article, I present evidence that hospital ownership-whether it is for-profit, nonprofit, or government owned-has a significant effect on the mix of medical services it offers. Despite notoriously weak enforcement mechanisms, nonprofit hospitals act in the public interest by providing services that are unlikely …

An Essay On The Need For Subsidized, Mandatory Long-Term Care Insurance, Lawrence A. Frolik

Articles

Imagine yourself in a room with 100 persons, all age sixty. Of the group, fifty-three are women and forty-seven are men. Racially and ethnically they mirror the population of Americans age sixty. Now answer the question: "Before the 100 die, how many will require long-term care and, on the average, for how many days and at what cost?" Give up? So do I. While it is common knowledge that many of us will need long-term care, no one seems to know how many will need such care or for how long. And some of you will ask, 'What do you …