Law Commons^™

Choosing Affordable Health Insurance, Govind Persad

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

The Affordable Care Act ("ACA") made health insurance accessible to many. Yet unaffordable insurance still abounds. This Article proposes a strategy for improving affordability that enables health insurance purchasers to choose, within reasonable limits, which treatments their insurance covers. After critiquing recently proposed strategies for improving affordability and reviewing past legal scholarship on content choice in health insurance, this Article introduces the "Affordable Choices" framework. This framework regulates choice in four ways. First, health plans should only exclude treatments whose merits are subject to reasonable disagreement among patients and physicians. Second, plans should appeal to purchasers' health-related values- values about …