Tax Law Commons^™

In Memory Of Professor James E. Bond, Janet Ainsworth

Seattle University Law Review

Janet Ainsworth, Professor of Law at Seattle University School of Law: In Memory of Professor James E. Bond.

Global Implementation Of Soda Taxes: Is There A Better Solution For Combatting Obesity?, Lauren Cedeno

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

As incidences of overweight and obese populations continue to increase around the world, countries are looking for ways to decrease the prevalence of this epidemic. Soda and SSB taxes have increased in prevalence as countries seek to address the health problems associated with consumption of soda and other sugary beverages. This Note explores the implementation of these taxes in Mexico, Europe, and the United States. In analyzing these taxes, this Note seeks to gain a greater understanding of whether these taxes have impacted overweight and obesity rates in the countries and municipalities that have enacted them. This Note argues that …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Tax Talk And Reproductive Technology, Bridget J. Crawford

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

The tax system both reacts to and helps create attitudes about the value of certain behaviors and choices. This Article makes three principal claims—one empirical, one normative, and one interpretative. The Article demonstrates through data that a representative sample of fertility clinics in the United States does not make information about the tax consequences of compensated human egg transfers—commonly called egg “donation”—publicly available. In 2015, in a case of first impression, the United States Tax Court decided in Perez v. Commissioner that a compensated egg transferor must report as income any amount she receives for her eggs. Although the Tax …

Money That Costs Too Much: Regulating Financial Incentives, Kristen Underhill

Indiana Law Journal

Money may not corrupt. But should we worry if it corrodes? Legal scholars in a range of fields have expressed concern about “motivational crowding-out,” a process by which offering financial rewards for good behavior may undermine laudable social motivations, like professionalism or civic duty. Disquiet about the motivational impacts of incentives has now extended to health law, employment law, tax, torts, contracts, criminal law, property, and beyond. In some cases, the fear of crowding-out has inspired concrete opposition to innovative policies that marshal incentives to change individual behavior. But to date, our fears about crowding-out have been unfocused and amorphous; …

What A Long Strange Trip It’S Been For The 3.8% Net Investment Income Tax, Ausher M.B. Kofsky, Bryan P. Schmutz

Maryland Law Review Online

No abstract provided.

Bearing Hospital Tax Breaks: How Non-Profits Benefit From Your Surprise Medical Bills, Taylor N. Armstrong

Georgia State University Law Review

This Note addresses the growing issue of surprise medical bills and how the United States Tax Code can be used to prevent many patients from receiving these bills. Part I provides a background on surprise billing and market factors that have led to an increase in the bills as well as current legislative solutions to the problem. Part II analyzes the role that hospitals play in the insurance market, the current standards for nonprofit hospitals to receive tax exemption under Internal Revenue Code (IRC) § 501, and how these legal standards fall short of accomplishing the goals of the tax …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Equitable Health Savings Accounts, Samuel Estreicher, Clinton G. Wallace

Faculty Publications

This Article offers the first comprehensive legal-policy critique of existing Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), arguing that the current approach is redistributively regressive, thus exacerbating inequality, and also fails to accomplish stated healthcare goals. We propose an alternative—Equitable Health Savings Accounts—which uses cash grants as a tool to address both of these problems. Equitable HSAs are a market-based social program that calibrates size and delivery of a government subsidy to help the least well off and to facilitate participation in healthcare markets. Equitable HSAs can serve as a model for using cash grants to bridge the gap between Republican social policy …

2017 Annual Survey: Recent Developments In Sports Law, Jordan Lysiak, Katherine Hampel

Marquette Sports Law Review

None

Index: Sports Law In Law Reviews And Journals, Jordan Lysiak

Marquette Sports Law Review

None

Medical Necessity: A Higher Hurdle For Marginalized Taxpayers?, Julie Furr Youngman, Courtney D. Hauck

Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review

Civil rights protection for transgender people—and in particular access to affordable health care—is currently the subject of intense political scrutiny, with a hostile administration chipping away at legal protections. Among other setbacks, a federal district court enjoined regulatory guidelines that were issued in 2016 to clarify that the federal prohibition on sex discrimination in health insurance applies to discrimination on the basis of gender identity and transgender status, and the promulgating agency itself is now reconsidering the guidelines. Without explicit federal protections against discrimination by health insurers and in the face of uneven state law protections, the ability to deduct …

Index: Sports Law In Law Reviews And Journals, Jordan Lysiak

Marquette Sports Law Review

None

Open Source: The Enewsletter Of Rwu Law 09-22-2017, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

How States Can Respond To The Ahca: Using The Mccarran-Ferguson Act, David Gamage, Darien Shanske

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Using Taxes To Support Multiple Health Insurance Risk Pools, David Gamage, Darien Shanske

Articles by Maurer Faculty

In most markets, it is considered desirable for consumers to have more choices. But health insurance regulation is different. When it comes to health insurance, giving consumers more choices can result in the market collapsing — leaving the sickest and most needy consumers without any good choices at all. To mitigate this problem, the Affordable Care Act’s Exchanges were designed around maintaining a single exchange-based risk pool. However, one problem with this approach taken by the Affordable Care Act is that the regulations designed to maintain the single exchange-based risk pool have the side effect of limiting some potentially positive …

Changing The Tax Code To Create Consumer-Driven Health Insurance Competition, Regina Herzlinger, Barak D. Richman

Faculty Scholarship

Because current tax laws exclude employer-paid health insurance premiums from employees’ taxable wages and income, employer-sponsored insurance remains the primary source of health insurance for most employed Americans. Economists have long blamed the employer-based insurance tax exclusion for inflating health care costs, and, more recently, for constraining income growth and exacerbating income inequality.

We execute a simulation to test the effect of permitting employees to receive their employers’ premium contribution directly and then purchase health insurance themselves, using tax-free funds. Employees could deduct for income tax purposes the amount used for insurance and, if they spend less than the amount …

Employer Shared Responsibility Provisions Under The Affordable Care Act, Xuan Hong

The Contemporary Tax Journal

No abstract provided.

Nfib V. Sebelius And The Individual Mandate: Thoughts On The Tax/Regulation Distinction, Kyle D. Logue

Michigan Business & Entrepreneurial Law Review

When Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion of the Court in National Federation of Independent Businesses v. Sebelius (NFIB) explaining the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) minimum essential coverage provision (sometimes referred to as the individual mandate), he reasoned that the mandate—or, more precisely, the enforcement provision that accompanied the mandate (the Shared Responsibility Payment or SRP)—could be understood as a tax on the failure to purchase health insurance. According to this view, the enactment of the mandate and its accompanying enforcement provisions fell within Congress’s virtually unlimited power to “lay and collect taxes.” This tax-based interpretation …

Fixing The Fmla's Flaws: A Fight For Care, Adult Children, And Tax Incentives, Kelsey A. Jonas

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Reconciling The Premium Tax Credit: Painful Complications For Lower And Middle-Income Taxpayers, Francine J. Lipman, James E. Williamson

Scholarly Works

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) makes available to certain middle and lower-income individuals a refundable tax credit, the Premium Tax Credit (PTC), designed to help them pay the premiums on their qualified health care plans. To achieve Congress’s goal of making health insurance affordable, the PTC is most often provided directly to an individual’s insurance provider each month in advance of actually claiming the PTC on the individual’s year-end annual tax return. Of the almost twelve million individuals who have enrolled in health insurance through the federal and state health exchanges in 2015, 85% of these individuals …

The Phase-Out And Sunset Of Travel Restrictions In The International Health Regulations, Sarah R. Goldfarb

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

Whether and to what extent travel restriction should be implemented during international infectious disease epidemics became a controversial issue, most recently, during the 2014 Ebola outbreak. The primary authority on the manner in which to respond to such epidemics is the International Health Regulations (IHR). The IHR is a treaty, established by the World Health Organization (WHO), which governs and coordinates international responses to international infectious disease epidemics. Despite the WHO's strong advisement to the contrary, many countries who were signatories to the IHR implemented travel bans and other types of travel restrictions to prevent the transmission of the disease …

Irresponsibly Taxing Irresponsibility: The Individual Tax Penalty Under The Affordable Care Act, Francine J. Lipman, James Owens

Scholarly Works

In recent decades, Congress has used the federal income tax system increasingly to administer and deliver social benefits. This transition is consistent with the evolution of the American welfare system into workfare over the last several decades. As more and more social welfare benefits are conditioned upon work, family composition, and means-tested by income levels, the income tax system where this data is already systematically aggregated, authenticated, and processed has become the go-to administrative agency.

Nevertheless, as the National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson has noted there are “substantial differences between benefits agencies and enforcement agencies in terms of culture, mindset, …

No Good Options: Picking Up The Pieces After King V. Burwell, Nicholas Bagley, David K. Jones

Articles

If the Supreme Court rules against the government in King v. Burwell, insurance subsidies available under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) will evaporate in the thirty-four states that have refused to establish their own health-care exchanges. The pain could be felt within weeks. Without subsidies, an estimated eight or nine million people stand to lose their health coverage. Because sicker people will retain coverage at a much higher rate than healthier people, insurance premiums in the individual market will surge by as much as fifty percent. Policymakers will come under intense pressure to mitigate the fallout from a government loss …

King V. Burwell: Brief For Professors Thomas W. Merrill, Gillian E. Metzger, Abbe R. Gluck, And Nicholas Bagley As Amici Curiae Supporting Respondents, Nicholas Bagley

Appellate Briefs

The Amici teach and write about federalism, constitutional law, and legislation. Amici submit this brief in the hope that its analysis of the federalism issues in this case will be of value to the Court.

The parties to this case have set forth two opposing interpretations of the Exchange provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), Pub. L. No. 111-148, 124 Stat. 119. Under petitioners' interpretation, federal taxpayer subsidies are available only to those who purchase insurance on Exchanges that are set up by the States and are not available to those who do so on HHS-facilitated …

Predicting The Fallout From King V. Burwell - Exchanges And The Aca, Nicholas Bagley, David K. Jones, Timothy Stoltzfus Jost

Articles

The U.S. Supreme Court's surprise announcement on November 7 that it would hear King v. Burwell struck fear in the hearts of supporters of the Affordable Cara Act (ACA). At stake is the legality of an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) rule extending tax credits to the 4.5 million people who bought their health plans in the 34 states that declined to establish their own health insurance exchanges under the ACA. The case hinges on enigmatic statutory language that seems to link the amount of tax credits to a health plan purchased "through an Exchange established by the State." According to …

Foreword--King V. Burwell Symposium: Comments On The Commentaries (And On Some Elephants In The Room), David Gamage

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This invited essay reviews the pieces submitted for the Pepperdine Law Review symposium on the King v. Burwell case. The thrust of this essay's response commentary is to praise the submitted essays for their excellence and insightfulness, but to suggest that the submitted essays nonetheless might benefit from focusing more on the role of the political mobilization that resulted in the King v. Burwell dispute. Ultimately, this essay suggests that what may have motivated the Supreme Court to develop and apply its new "deep economic and political significance" test in this this case may not have been anything inherent to …

The Medical Device Excise Tax: An Unfair Burden, Elizabeth M. Bolka

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Beer, Liquor, Or A Little Bit Of Both? Getting To The Bottom Of Properly Classifying Flavored Malt Beverages In The United States And Australia, Bryan A. Schivera

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

The Individual Mandate Tax Penalty, Jeffrey H. Kahn

Scholarly Publications

In 2010, President Obama signed legislation that significantly altered the healthcare and health insurance markets in the United States. An integral part of that reform is the individual mandate, a provision that requires individuals to purchase and maintain healthcare insurance. Failure to maintain such coverage subjects an individual to a tax penalty. The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of that provision under Congress’s taxing power.

Despite the Supreme Court upholding the individual mandate, fundamental questions remain. This Article addresses the question of whether the use of a tax penalty to encourage taxpayers to do something that the government desires is …