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Equitable Health Savings Accounts, Samuel Estreicher, Clinton G. Wallace Jan 2019

Equitable Health Savings Accounts, Samuel Estreicher, Clinton G. Wallace

Faculty Publications

This Article offers the first comprehensive legal-policy critique of existing Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), arguing that the current approach is redistributively regressive, thus exacerbating inequality, and also fails to accomplish stated healthcare goals. We propose an alternative—Equitable Health Savings Accounts—which uses cash grants as a tool to address both of these problems. Equitable HSAs are a market-based social program that calibrates size and delivery of a government subsidy to help the least well off and to facilitate participation in healthcare markets. Equitable HSAs can serve as a model for using cash grants to bridge the gap between Republican social policy …

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The Private Insurance Market: Not Very Big And Not Insuring Much, Either, Jacqueline R. Fox Dec 2018

The Private Insurance Market: Not Very Big And Not Insuring Much, Either, Jacqueline R. Fox

Faculty Publications

Creating a single national health insurance pool is not likely to destabilize the economy by supplanting the private health insurance industry. This industry insures a relatively small percentage of the population and holds very little of the risk such insurance implies. In effect, insurance companies function as middlemen, bundling risk packages to distribute to other, larger companies and so serve a limited purpose. Were insurers to handle claims for a national pool as they do for the Medicare program, any destabilization to the economy more broadly would be further minimized.

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Zika And The Failure To Act Under The Police Power, Jacqueline Fox May 2017

Zika And The Failure To Act Under The Police Power, Jacqueline Fox

Faculty Publications

Zika is a mosquito-borne and sexually transmitted disease that is a dangerous threat to pregnant women, causing catastrophic birth defects in a large percentage of fetuses when their mothers become infected while pregnant. It raises numerous issues related to abortion, birth control, poverty, and women’s control over their procreative choices. While the United States received ample warning from January 2016 onward that it was at risk of local transmission of this virus and public health officials at all levels generally behaved properly, the state and federal legislative responses in the summer of 2016 were entirely inadequate. For example, no state …

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Reforming Healthcare Reform, Jacqueline Fox Jan 2016