Law Commons^™

If You Would Not Criminalize Poverty, Do Not Medicalize It, William M. Sage, Jennifer E. Laurin

Faculty Scholarship

American society tends to medicalize or criminalize social problems. Criminal justice reformers have made arguments for a positive role in the relief of poverty that are similar to those aired in healthcare today. The consequences of criminalizing poverty caution against its continued medicalization.

Cross-Subsidies: Government's Hidden Pocketbook, John Brooks, Brian Galle, Brendan S. Maher

Faculty Scholarship

Governments can use regulation to pay for public goods out of the pockets of consumers, rather than taxpayers. For example, the Affordable Care Act underwrites care for women and the infirm through higher insurance premium payments by healthy men. Building on a classic article from Richard Posner, we show that these “cross-subsidies” between consumers are a common feature of modern law, ranging from telecommunications to intellectual property to employee benefits.

Critics of the ACA, and even some of its supporters, argue that taxes would be a better choice. Taxes are said to be more transparent, and to fit better with …

Minding The Protection Gap: Resolving Unintended, Pervasive, Profound Homeowner Underinsurance, Kenneth S. Klein

Faculty Scholarship

A significant majority of homeowners in the United States unwittingly have less insurance than necessary to rebuild their home in the event of a complete loss. This persistent, multibillion-dollar protection gap first emerged in the 1990s and has never resolved despite a desire by most homeowners to contract for full replacement coverage. While a great deal of academic and industry literature has addressed the issue of underinsurance, the work has been done without reference to two sources that unlock the conundrum. The first is the 1550+ page administrative rulemaking file of the California Department of Insurance collected in the wake …

Ideology Meets Reality: What Works And What Doesn't In Patient Exposure To Health Care Costs, Christopher Robertson, Victor Laurion

Faculty Scholarship

U.S. policymakers, scholars, and advocates have long displayed an ideological commitment to exposing insured patients to substantial out-of-pocket expenses. These commitments derive from both overt political ideologies, which favor individual responsibility and oppose redistribution of wealth and risks, as well as more-subtle ideological commitments of academic economists, which link observed patterns of consumption to value-claims about welfare. In this symposium contribution, we document those ideological commitments and juxtapose them with a review of the scientific evidence about the actual effects of patient cost-sharing. We find, as economic theory predicts, that patients exposed to healthcare costs consume less healthcare. However, a …