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Full-Text Articles in Law
Mandatory Rules And Default Rules In Insurance Contracts, Tom Baker, Kyle D. Logue
Mandatory Rules And Default Rules In Insurance Contracts, Tom Baker, Kyle D. Logue
Law & Economics Working Papers
The economic analysis of contract law can organized around two general questions: (1) what are the efficient or welfare-maximizing substantive rules of contract law; and (2) once those rules have been identified, when if ever should they be made mandatory and when should they be merely “default rules” that the parties can contract around if they wish? Much of contract theory over the past twenty years has been devoted to developing answers to those two questions. The same two questions can be posed with respect to the rules of insurance law. Although previous scholars have examined particular substantive doctrines of …
Understanding Insurance Anti-Discrimination Laws, Ronen Avraham, Kyle D. Logue, Daniel Benjamin Schwarcz
Understanding Insurance Anti-Discrimination Laws, Ronen Avraham, Kyle D. Logue, Daniel Benjamin Schwarcz
Law & Economics Working Papers
Insurance companies are in the business of discrimination. Insurers attempt to segregate insureds into separate risk pools based on their differences in risk profiles, first, so that they can charge different premiums to the different groups based on their risk and, second, to incentivize risk reduction by insureds. This is why we let insurers discriminate. There are, however, limits to the types of discrimination we will allow insurers to engage in. But what exactly are those limits and how are they justified? To answer these questions, this Article articulates the leading fairness and efficiency arguments for and against limiting insurers’ …
Explaining Variation In Insurance Anti-Discrimination Laws, Ronen Avraham, Kyle D. Logue, Daniel Benjamin Schwarcz
Explaining Variation In Insurance Anti-Discrimination Laws, Ronen Avraham, Kyle D. Logue, Daniel Benjamin Schwarcz
Law & Economics Working Papers
Discrimination in insurance underwriting is regulated at the state level. Surprisingly, there is a great deal of variation across jurisdictions in how and the extent to which risk classification by insurers is limited. Some states expressly permit insurers to consider certain characteristics, while other characteristics are forbidden or limited in various ways. What explains this variation across states? Drawing on a unique, hand-collected data-set consisting of the laws regulating insurer risk classification in all 51 U.S. jurisdictions, this Article argues that much of the variation in state-level regulation of risk classification can in fact be explained by focusing exclusively on …
Essential Health Benefits And The Affordable Care Act: Law And Process, Nicholas Bagley, Helen Levy
Essential Health Benefits And The Affordable Care Act: Law And Process, Nicholas Bagley, Helen Levy
Law & Economics Working Papers
Beginning in 2014, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) will require private insurance plans sold in the individual and small-group markets to cover a roster of “essential health benefits.” Precisely which benefits should count as essential, however, was left to the discretion of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The matter was both important and controversial. HHS nonetheless announced its policy on essential health benefits by posting on its website a 13-page bulletin stating that it would allow each state to define essential benefits for itself by choosing a “benchmark” plan modeled on existing plans in the state. On …