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Full-Text Articles in Law
Allocating Responsibility For Health Care Decisions Under The United States Affordable Care Act, Wendy K. Mariner
Allocating Responsibility For Health Care Decisions Under The United States Affordable Care Act, Wendy K. Mariner
Faculty Scholarship
This article summarizes the major elements of the ACA's insurance reforms and how they affect responsibility for making decisions about the health care that people receive. A key example of the difficulty of allocating decision making responsibility is the effort to define a minimum benefit package for insurance plans, called essential health benefits. While the ACA should achieve its goal of near-universal access to care, it leaves in place a multiplicity of processes and decision-makers for determining individual treatment. As a result, decisions about what care is provided are likely to remain, much as they are today, divided among government …
Health Insurance Is Dead; Long Live Health Insurance, Wendy K. Mariner
Health Insurance Is Dead; Long Live Health Insurance, Wendy K. Mariner
Faculty Scholarship
Today, health insurance is no longer simply a class of insurance that covers risks to health, and it has not been so for many years. Health insurance has become a unique form of insurance — a mechanism to pay for healthcare that uses risk spreading as one of several pricing methods. The Affordable Care Act builds on this important payment function to create a complex social insurance system to finance healthcare for (almost) everyone. This article examines how the ACA draws on various conceptions of insurance to produce a quasi-social insurance system. This system poses new challenges to laws governing …