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Social Welfare Law Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Social Welfare Law

Insurance In Sociolegal Research, Tom Baker May 2010

Insurance In Sociolegal Research, Tom Baker

All Faculty Scholarship

Insurance has a long history in sociolegal research, most prominently as a window on accident compensation and related tort law in action. Recent work has extended that research, with the result that tort law in action may be the best mapped of any legal field outside criminal law. Sociological research has begun to explore insurance as a form of governance, with effects in many legal fields and across the economy. This essay reviews developments in both bodies of work. Part one examines the relationship between liability insurance and tort law in action using the metaphors of window and frame. Part …


Readability, Contracts Of Recurring Use, And The Problem Of Ex Post Judicial Governance Of Health Insurance Polices, John Aloysius Cogan, Jr. Jan 2010

Readability, Contracts Of Recurring Use, And The Problem Of Ex Post Judicial Governance Of Health Insurance Polices, John Aloysius Cogan, Jr.

Faculty Articles and Papers

While the rhetoric surrounding the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act focused on core issues such as cost, quality, and access to care, the dialog rarely acknowledged a key problem-the fact that most Americans do not understand their health insurance. Simply put, consumers do not fully grasp their health insurance coverage because the jargon found in many health insurance contracts is impenetrable to most Americans. This is disconcerting because consumer-oriented information is central to our increasingly consumer-directed health care system. Consumers are expected to make cost-effective choices among the array of health insurance plans that may be …


Tontines For The Invincibles: Enticing Low Risks Into The Health-Insurance Pool With An Idea From Insurance History And Behavioral Economics, Tom Baker, Peter Siegelman Jan 2010

Tontines For The Invincibles: Enticing Low Risks Into The Health-Insurance Pool With An Idea From Insurance History And Behavioral Economics, Tom Baker, Peter Siegelman

All Faculty Scholarship

Over one third of the uninsured adults in the U.S. below retirement age are between 19 and 29 years old. Young adults, especially men, often go without insurance, even when buying it is mandatory and sometimes even when it is a low cost employment benefit. This paper proposes a new form of health insurance targeted at this group—the “Young Invincibles”—those who (wrongly) believe that they don’t need health insurance because they won’t get sick. Our proposal offers a cash bonus to those who turn out to be right in their belief that they did not really need health insurance. The …


Oil And Water: Mixing Individual Mandates, Fragmented Markets, And Health Reform, Allison K. Hoffman Jan 2010

Oil And Water: Mixing Individual Mandates, Fragmented Markets, And Health Reform, Allison K. Hoffman

All Faculty Scholarship

With momentum toward national health reform, there is wide support for legislation to include an individual mandate that would require all Americans to carry health insurance. Discussion of the individual mandate has relied largely on whether the mandate will generate universal coverage as a gauge for success. This article challenges the notion that an individual mandate is successful if it leads to universal coverage, revealing a critical problem the individual mandate will face even if all Americans were to have health insurance. To uncover this problem, this article sets out a novel framework that disentangles the three different policy objectives …