Law Commons^™

Medicaid, Low Income Pools, And The Goals Of Privatization, Laura Hermer

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines the Bush Administration's attempts to transform certain supplemental payments, most notably Medicaid’s Disproportionate Share Hospital (DSH) program, into a means of subsidizing private health coverage for Medicaid expansion populations. Greater private market involvement in the state disbursement of supplemental payments such as DSH makes it more difficult to fulfill Medicaid’s original goals. It reduces the overall funds available specifically for care, provides beneficiaries with leaner benefit plans than those offered by the public system, and hinders beneficiaries from obtaining and retaining care. As such, it increases waste and inefficiency, rather than reducing them. At the same time, …

Stratification Of The Welfare Poor: Intersections Of Gender, Race & "Worthiness" In Poverty Discourse And Policy, Bridgette Baldwin

Faculty Scholarship

This Article analyzes the historical, cultural and legal treatments and representations of poor black women from Progressive Era philanthropic aid to early "work-to-welfare" reform protocol. When black women serve as the case study for a larger examination of social policy issues we see that welfare was rarely meant to remedy the structural crunch of poverty. Working class black women have been at the center of the construction of the poor and serve as the designation to determine which people deserve to be compensated for being poor.

Furthermore, the Author discusses both the ramifications and rationale of why the government never …

From The Greenhouse To The Poorhouse: Carbon Emissions Control And The Rules Of Legislative Joinder, David A. Super

Faculty Scholarship

Pending legislation to address carbon emissions would include large subsidies for existing emitters. These subsidies make little sense economically or politically. Worse, they divert resources needed to address two crucial issues that the proposed legislation largely ignores: the impact of raising carbon costs on low-income people and the massive structural federal deficit. A carbon tax or cap-and-trade system would increase costs substantially not only for transportation but for food and housing. With poverty rising even before the current economic downturn, these price increases’ consequences could be dire. The structural deficit will require deflationary tax increases or spending cuts. Combining carbon …

Social Welfare And Fairness In Juvenile Crime Regulation, Elizabeth S. Scott, Laurence Steinberg

Faculty Scholarship

The question of how lawmakers should respond to developmental differences between adolescents and adults in formulating juvenile crime policy has been the subject of debate for a generation. A theme of the punitive law reforms that dismantled the traditional juvenile justice system in the 1980s and 1990s was that adolescents were not different from adults in any way that was relevant to criminal punishment – or at least that any differences were trumped by the demands of public safety. But this view has been challenged in recent years; scholars and courts have recognized that adolescents, due to their developmental immaturity, …