Disability Law Commons^™

Expansion Of Employee Wellness Programs Under Ppaca Creates Additional Barriers To Healthcare Insurance For Individuals With Disabilities, Amy B. Cheng

Journal of Law and Health

There are many barriers to healthcare for the general population that has been documented throughout the years, with one particularly affected group being individuals with disabilities. One identified healthcare barrier for individuals with disabilities is the inability to gain access to the healthcare system through health insurance. While many attempts have been made to resolve this issue, serious problems have yet to be resolved. The Patient Protection Affordable Care Act (PPACA) attempted to solve the issue by expanding Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996’s (HIPAA) current regulations on employee wellness programs. The relevant regulations govern employee wellness programs …

Gambling Disorder, Vulnerability, And The Law: Mapping The Field, Stacey A. Tovino

Scholarly Works

This Article seeks to descriptively map the sub-field of gambling disorder and the law and ask whether individuals with gambling disorder are vulnerable under the law. Like other scholarship that descriptively maps ethical, legal, and social implications of lesser known conditions and developments, this Article seeks to describe the treatment of individuals with gambling disorder in a variety of illustrative, but not exhaustive, legal contexts, to identify the limited scholarship assessing the application of the law to individuals with gambling disorder, and to invite members of the health law academy to bring their significant expertise to bear on these issues …

Dying Fast: Suicide In Individuals With Gambling Disorder, Stacey A. Tovino

Scholarly Works

These published remarks carefully document the history of health insurance coverage of gambling disorder. They begin by providing examples of gambling disorder insurance benefit disparities in the contexts of public health care programs and private health plans. They proceed by reviewing the effect of three pieces of legislation, including the Mental Health Parity Act of 1996, the Paul Wellstone and Pete Domenici Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008, and the Affordable Care Act of 2010, on public and private insurance coverage of gambling disorder. They highlight the partial victory that will occur in some states beginning in …

Classifying Obesity As A Disability Under The Americans With Disabilities Act: How Seff V. Broward County Is Incongruent With Recent Ada Litigation, Maura Flaherty Mccoy

Catholic University Law Review

This Note discusses how employer wellness programs are potential breeding grounds for Americans with Disabilities Act discrimination claims in light of recent ADA cases relating to obesity and how courts’ treatment of the safe harbor provision of the ADA is incongruent with the broadening of ADA claims. It looks at the provisions of the ADA and how courts have traditionally defined “disability” in obesity cases, describes the ADA safe harbor provision, and discusses the advent of corporate wellness programs. This Note then analyzes Seff v. Broward County, the most notable wellness program case to-date, and how the court’s decision …

One Step Closer To Mental Health Parity, Lorraine Schmall

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Politics Of Infertility: Recognizing Coverage Exclusions As Discrimination, Elizabeth Pendo

All Faculty Scholarship

Infertility affects approximately ten percent of the reproductive-age population in the United States, and strikes people of every race, ethnicity and socio-economic level. It is recognized by the medical community as a disease, one with devastating physical, psychological, and financial effects.

In 1998, the Supreme Court held in Bragdon v. Abbott that reproduction is a major life activity within the meaning of the ADA. Many lawyers, activists and scholars thought that coverage for infertility treatment would follow soon after. In fact, in 2003 in the first major case applying Bragdon to health benefits, Saks v. Franklin Covey, the Second Circuit …

Discrimination Against The Unhealthy In Health Insurance, Mary Crossley

Articles

As employers seek to contain their health care costs and politicians create coverage mechanisms to promote individual empowerment, people with health problems increasingly are forced to shoulder the load of their own medical costs. The trend towards consumerism in health coverage shifts not simply costs, but also insurance risk, to individual insureds, and the results may be particularly dire for people in poor health. This Article describes a growing body of research showing that unhealthy people can be expected disproportionately to pay the price for consumerism, not only in dollars, but in preventable disease and disability as well. In short, …

Becoming Visible: The Ada's Impact On Healthcare For Persons With Disabilities, Mary Crossley

Articles

This Article will adopt the perspective of individuals with disabilities in their encounters with the health care finance and delivery system in the United States, and will pose the question of what the past decade has shown the ADA to mean (or not mean) for those individuals' ability to seek, receive, and pay for effective health care services. To that end, this Article will provide an overview of three broad areas on which the ADA has had varying degrees of impact.

Part II of the Article will examine how the ADA has affected the rights of an individual with a …