Law Commons^™

A Closer Look At The Federalization Snowball, Abigail R. Moncrieff

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

While on the academic job market, I presented Federalization Snowballs to several stellar law faculties.1 My argument, in short, was that: (1) federal healthcare spending allows the states to externalize onto the federal government about 40% of the utilization costs associated with their medical malpractice policies (such as the cost of defensive medicine); (2) such an externality systematically distorts a rational state’s incentive to reform medical malpractice; and (3) federalization of medical malpractice is necessary to correct the distortion. In other words, I argued that federalization of healthcare spending through Medicare, Medicaid, and similar programs has snowballed into a need …

Federalization Snowballs: The Need For National Action In Medical Malpractice Reform, Abigail R. Moncrieff

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Because tort law and healthcare regulation are traditional state functions and because medical, legal, and insurance practices are localized, legal scholars have long believed that medical malpractice falls within the states' exclusive jurisdiction and sovereignty. This conventional view fails to consider the impact that federal healthcare programs have on the states' incentives to regulate. As a result of federal financing, each state externalizes some of the costs of its malpractice policy onto the federal government. The federal government therefore needs to take charge of medical malpractice in order to fix the spillover problem created by existing federal healthcare programs.

Importantly, …

In The Back Alleys Of Health Care: Abortion, Equality And Community In Canada, Joanna Erdman

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The decriminalization of abortion in Canada ensured neither its availability nor accessibility as an integrated and publicly funded health service. While Canadian women are increasingly referred to or seek abortion services from single-purpose clinics, their exclusion from public health insurance often render these services inaccessible. This article considers denied funding for clinic abortion services from the perspective of the Canadian constitutional guarantee of sex equality. The article focuses on the 2004 Court of Queen's Bench's judgment in Jane Doe I v. Manitoba, which framed denied public funding for clinic abortion services as a violation of women's equality rights under the …