Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Discipline
- Publication
- Publication Type
Articles 1 - 14 of 14
Full-Text Articles in Insurance Law
Reform At Risk — Mandating Participation In Alternative Payment Plans, Scott Levy, Nicholas Bagley, Rahul Rajkumar
Reform At Risk — Mandating Participation In Alternative Payment Plans, Scott Levy, Nicholas Bagley, Rahul Rajkumar
Articles
In an ambitious effort to slow the growth of health care costs, the Affordable Care Act created the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) and armed it with broad authority to test new approaches to reimbursement for health care (payment models) and delivery-system reforms. CMMI was meant to be the government’s innovation laboratory for health care: an entity with the independence to break with past practices and the power to experiment with bold new approaches. Over the past year, however, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has quietly hobbled CMMI, imperiling its ability to generate meaningful data …
Small Change, Big Consequences — Partial Medicaid Expansions Under The Aca, Adrianna Mcintyre, Allan M. Joseph, Nicholas Bagley
Small Change, Big Consequences — Partial Medicaid Expansions Under The Aca, Adrianna Mcintyre, Allan M. Joseph, Nicholas Bagley
Articles
Though congressional efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA) seem to have stalled, the Trump administration retains broad executive authority to reshape the health care landscape. Perhaps the most consequential choices that the administration will make pertain to Medicaid, which today covers more than 1 in 5 Americans. Much has been made of proposals to introduce work requirements or cost sharing to the program. But another decision of arguably greater long-term significance has been overlooked: whether to allow “partial expansions” pursuant to a state Medicaid waiver. Arkansas has already submitted a waiver request for a partial expansion, …
Spending Medicare’S Dollars Wisely: Taking Aim At Hospitals’ Cultures Of Overtreatment, Jessica Mantel
Spending Medicare’S Dollars Wisely: Taking Aim At Hospitals’ Cultures Of Overtreatment, Jessica Mantel
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
With Medicare’s rising costs threatening the country’s fiscal health, policymakers have focused their attention on a primary cause of Medicare’s high price tag—the overtreatment of patients. Guided by professional norms that demand they do “everything possible” for their patients, physicians frequently order additional diagnostic tests, perform more procedures, utilize costly technologies, and provide more inpatient care. Much of this care, however, does not improve Medicare patients’ health, but only increases Medicare spending. Reducing the overtreatment of patients requires aligning physicians’ interests with the government’s goal of spending Medicare’s dollars wisely. Toward that end, recent Medicare payment reforms establish a range …
Three Words And The Future Of The Affordable Care Act, Nicholas Bagley
Three Words And The Future Of The Affordable Care Act, Nicholas Bagley
Articles
As an essential part of its effort to achieve near universal coverage, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) extends sizable tax credits to most people who buy insurance on the newly established health care exchanges. Yet several lawsuits have been filed challenging the availability of those tax credits in the thirty-four states that refused to set up their own exchanges. The lawsuits are premised on a strained interpretation of the ACA that, if accepted, would make a hash of other provisions of the statute and undermine its effort to extend coverage to the uninsured. The courts should reject this latest effort …
Why It's Called The Affordable Care Act, Nicholas Bagley, Jill R. Horwitz
Why It's Called The Affordable Care Act, Nicholas Bagley, Jill R. Horwitz
Articles
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (“ACA”) raises numerous policy and legal issues, but none have attracted as much attention from lawyers as Section 1501. This provision, titled “Maintenance of Mini-mum Essential Coverage,” but better known as the “individual mandate,” requires most Americans to obtain health insurance for themselves and their dependents by 2014. We are dismayed that the narrow issue of the mandate and the narrower issue of free riding have garnered so much attention when our nation’s health-care system suffers from countless problems. By improving quality, controlling costs, and extending coverage to the uninsured, the …
The Unaffordable Health Care Act - A Reponse To Professors Bagley And Horwitz, Douglas A. Kahn, Jeffrey H. Kahn
The Unaffordable Health Care Act - A Reponse To Professors Bagley And Horwitz, Douglas A. Kahn, Jeffrey H. Kahn
Articles
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 has stirred considerable controversy. In the public debate over the program, many of its proponents have defended it by focusing on what is sometimes called the “free-rider” problem. In a prior article, we contended that the free-rider problem has been greatly exaggerated and was not a significant factor in the congressional decision to adopt the Act. We maintained that the free-rider issue is a red herring advanced to trigger an emotional attraction to the Act and distract attention from the actual issues that favor and disfavor its adoption. In a recently …
Free Rider: A Justification For Mandatory Medical Insurance Under Health Care Reform?, Douglas A. Kahn, Jeffrey H. Kahn
Free Rider: A Justification For Mandatory Medical Insurance Under Health Care Reform?, Douglas A. Kahn, Jeffrey H. Kahn
Articles
Section 1501 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act added section 5000A to the Internal Revenue Code to require most individuals in the United States, beginning in the year 2014, to purchase an established minimum level of medical insurance. This requirement, which is enforced by a penalty imposed on those who fail to comply, is sometimes referred to as the “individual mandate.” The individual mandate is one element of a vast change to the provision of medical care that Congress implemented in 2010. The individual mandate has proved to be controversial and has been the subject of a number …
Reconstructing The Individual Mandate As An Escrow Account, Gregg D. Polsky
Reconstructing The Individual Mandate As An Escrow Account, Gregg D. Polsky
Michigan Law Review First Impressions
The recent health care reform law's most controversial provision is the individual mandate, which imposes a fine on individuals who fail to obtain a minimum level of health insurance coverage. Many object to this policy, arguing that the government shouldn't force individuals to purchase health insurance. Others believe that the mandate is a necessary component to health care reform. What has been missed in the discussion is that Congress could restructure the individual mandate to avoid the requirement that individuals purchase health insurance while still fulfilling its principal function. The principal purpose of the mandate is not to require individuals …
Review Of Reforming Medicare: Options, Tradeoffs, And Opportunities, Jill R. Horwitz
Review Of Reforming Medicare: Options, Tradeoffs, And Opportunities, Jill R. Horwitz
Reviews
Medicare needs fixing. The program has its strengths; it is popular among beneficiaries, has very low administrative costs (maybe too low), and, since its inception, has greatly reduced financial risk exposure among beneficiaries. Nevertheless, it is unaffordable and inefficient. Jeanne Lambrew and Henry Aaron take up both of these challenges for Medicare reform in great detail in Reforming Medicare.
The Virtues Of Medicare, Jill R. Horwitz
The Virtues Of Medicare, Jill R. Horwitz
Reviews
Most of us look forward to a heaven where people don't get sick. But if they do, health care would be traded among fully informed patients and providers in perfectly competitive and frictionless markets. In that perfect world, sick citizens simply shop for doctors the way they shop for other consumer goods. The better doctors, like the most elegant hotel rooms and fanciest cars, would cost more than inferior doctors. Patients would consult their utility meters and, with appropriate attention to discounting over an infinite lifetime, choose accordingly. After each treatment, the patients would know the quality of their outcome …
Patients As Consumers: Courts, Cotnracts, And The New Medical Marketplace, Mark A. Hall, Carl E. Schneider
Patients As Consumers: Courts, Cotnracts, And The New Medical Marketplace, Mark A. Hall, Carl E. Schneider
Michigan Law Review
The persistent riddle of health-care policy is how to control the costs while improving the quality of care. The riddle's oncepromising answer-managed care-has been politically ravaged, and consumerist solutions are now winning favor This Article examines the legal condition of the patient-as-consumer in today's health-care market. It finds that insurers bargain with some success for rates for the people they insure. The uninsured, however, must contract to pay whatever a provider charges and then are regularly charged prices that are several times insurers'pricesa nd providers' actual costs. Perhaps because they do not understand the healthcare market, courts generally enforce these …
Managed Care- The First Chapter Comes To A Close, Sallyanne Payton
Managed Care- The First Chapter Comes To A Close, Sallyanne Payton
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
Introduction to the symposium, Managed Care: What's the Prognosis: Managing Care in the Next Century.
Clearing The Way For An Effective Federal-State Partnership In Health Reform, Eleanor D. Kinney
Clearing The Way For An Effective Federal-State Partnership In Health Reform, Eleanor D. Kinney
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
At century's end, states have assumed a very different role in the design, implementation, and operation of health service programs than they did twenty-five years ago. In the current volatile political atmosphere particularly at the federal level, states have taken up the mantle of healthcare reform in the final years of the 1990s. Yet there remain problems and difficulties with the current federal-state relationship in health reform. The critical question is whether states can successfully accomplish genuine reform given its politically charged, complex and costly nature. This question takes on particular significance for the most important reform-expanding coverage to the …
Democratizing Hmo Regulation To Enforce The "Rule Of Rescue", Kent G. Rutter
Democratizing Hmo Regulation To Enforce The "Rule Of Rescue", Kent G. Rutter
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
Despite heightened public concern about HMOs, misguided regulatory measures have not guaranteed HMO patients access to the treatment options many consider vital. This Note recommends four changes to the current regulatory system that would preserve HMOs' ability to control health care costs while allowing patients and doctors, rather than lawmakers or HMO administrators, to set health care priorities.