Law Commons^™

Pandemics, Paid Sick Leaves, And Tax Institutions, Alex Zhang

Faculty Articles

The COVID-19 pandemic is currently ravaging the world, and the United States has been largely unsuccessful at containing the coronavirus. One long-standing policy failure stands out as having exacerbated the pandemic in our country: the lack of a national mandate of paid sick leaves, without which workers face financial and workplace-cultural pressures to attend work while sick, thus spreading the virus to their fellow employees and the public at large.

This Article provides the blueprint for a national, subsidized mandate of paid sick leaves and two additional insights about our tax institutions as mechanisms of effectuating broader societal goals. It …

Health Reform Reconstruction, Lindsay F. Wiley, Elizabeth Y. Mccuskey, Matthew B. Lawrence, Erin C. Fuse Brown

Faculty Articles

This Article connects the failed, inequitable U.S. coronavirus pandemic response to conceptual and structural constraints that have held back U.S health reform for decades and calls for reconstruction. For more than a half-century, a cramped “iron triangle” ethos has constrained health reform conceptually. Reforms aimed to balance individual interests in cost, quality, and access to health care, while marginalizing equity, solidarity, and public health. In the iron triangle era, reforms unquestioningly accommodated four legally and logistically entrenched fixtures — individualism, fiscal fragmentation, privatization, and federalism — that distort and diffuse any reach toward social justice. The profound racial disparities and …