Law Commons^™

A Randomized Experiment Of The Split Benefit Health Insurance Reform To Reduce High-Cost, Low-Value Consumption, Christopher Robertson, David V. Yokum, Nimish Sheth, Keith A. Joiner

Faculty Scholarship

Traditional cost sharing for health care is stymied by limited patient wealth. The “split benefit” is a new way to reduce consumption of high-cost, low-value treatments for which the risk/benefit ratio is uncertain. When a physician prescribes a costly unproven procedure, the insurer could pay a portion of the benefit directly to the patient, creating a decision opportunity for the patient. The insurer saves the remainder, unless the patient consumes. In this paper, a vignette-based randomized controlled experiment with 1,800 respondents sought to test the potential efficacy of the split benefit. The intervention reduced the odds of consumption by about …

Saving The Federal Circuit, Paul Gugliuzza

Faculty Scholarship

In a recent, attention-grabbing speech, the Chief Judge of the Seventh Circuit, Diane Wood, argued that Congress should abolish the Federal Circuit’s exclusive jurisdiction over patent cases. Exclusive jurisdiction, she said, provides too much legal uniformity, which harms the patent system. In this response to Judge Wood’s thoughtful speech, I seek to highlight two important premises underlying her argument, neither of which is indisputably true.

The first premise is that the Federal Circuit actually provides legal uniformity. Judge Wood suggests that, due to the Federal Circuit’s exclusive jurisdiction, patent doctrine is insufficiently “percolated,” meaning that it lacks mechanisms through which …

“Exploitation Creep” And Development: A Response To Janie Chuang, Aziza Ahmed

Faculty Scholarship

In her article Exploitation Creep and the Unmaking of Human Trafficking Law, Janie Chuang insightfully describes transformations in the discourse on trafficking as it shifted from sex trafficking to human trafficking, and as human trafficking came to be understood as forced labor, and now modern day slavery. With each of these transformations, the United States government, self-anointed “global sheriff” of anti-trafficking efforts, deepened its emphasis on a prosecution-oriented strategy focused on individual perpetrator accountability. As an alternative trajectory, Chuang identifies and convincingly argues for a labor-rights approach that takes into consideration the structural causes of exploitation in the labor market, …