Law Commons^™

Structural Sex Discrimination: Why Gynecology Patients Suffer Avoidable Injuries And What The Law Can Do About It, Christopher Robertson, Annabel Kupke, Louise P. King

Faculty Scholarship

The nearly four million Americans who undergo gynecological surgeries each year suffer avoidable lifelong, painful, and disabling injuries. This Article diagnoses the root cause in our legal framework for healthcare finance and identifies legal solutions.

America’s public-private system for reimbursing healthcare pays for procedures rather than outcomes, and it pays substantially more for work on male rather than female anatomies. This disparity is due to the federal government’s reliance on a secretive industry committee to set those rates, and the committee’s reliance on junk science surveys, allowing self-interested and gender-biased responses, contrary to objective measures.

As payors disvalue the bodies …

The Affordable Care Act And Health Promotion: The Role Of Insurance In Defining Responsibility For Health Risks And Costs, Wendy K. Mariner

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines whether insurance is an appropriate mechanism for improving individual health or reducing the cost of health care for payers. The Affordable Care Act contains implicit standards for allocating responsibility for health, especially in provisions encouraging health promotion and wellness programs. A summary of the accumulating evidence of the effects of such programs suggests that wellness programs have been somewhat more effective in making people feel better than in reducing costs. Health promotion should be encouraged, because health is valuable for its own sake. Insurance is not well suited to improve health or manage behavioral risks to health; …