Insurance Law Commons^™

Case No. 23 - Hypertensive Brain Bleed In A 10 Year Old With Undiagnosed Kidney Disease, New York Law School

Anonymous Closed Medical Liability Cases

Anonymous Closed Medical Liability Case - Hypertensive Brain Bleed in a 10 year old with Undiagnosed Kidney Disease

Health Insurance Rate Review, John Aloysius Cogan, Jr.

Faculty Articles and Papers

No abstract provided.

The Government's Role In Climate Change Insurance, Peter Molk

UF Law Faculty Publications

There are no robust insurance markets for climate change insurance. While these markets would provide valuable loss-mitigation incentives, at the same time giving financial certainty to individuals and businesses that face staggering future liabilities, existing efforts have produced a fragmented set of private and public products that provide only piecemeal coverage. This symposium contribution examines the government’s role in providing unified markets for insuring climate change risk. Although innovations in reinsurance markets suggest that private insurers could cover discrete risks associated with climate change, such as flood or wind loss, climate change’s broader systemic risks present problems of scale and …

The Ownership Of Health Insurers, Peter Molk

UF Law Faculty Publications

Spending by private health insurers exceeds $800 billion and is expected to rise. The Affordable Care Act provides $2 billion in subsidies to jump-start health insurers owned by their policyholders in an attempt to bring these costs under control. Firms with this corporate ownership structure have succeeded in other insurance markets, where Nationwide, Northwestern Mutual, and State Farm are just a few prominent examples. However, the potential of policyholder ownership in health insurance, which is dominated by investor and nonprofit ownership, is poorly understood. This Article applies theories of corporate ownership and control to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of …

Dying Fast: Suicide In Individuals With Gambling Disorder, Stacey A. Tovino

Faculty Articles

These published remarks carefully document the history of health insurance coverage of gambling disorder. They begin by providing examples of gambling disorder insurance benefit disparities in the contexts of public health care programs and private health plans. They proceed by reviewing the effect of three pieces of legislation, including the Mental Health Parity Act of 1996, the Paul Wellstone and Pete Domenici Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008, and the Affordable Care Act of 2010, on public and private insurance coverage of gambling disorder. They highlight the partial victory that will occur in some states beginning in …

Removing The Legal Impediments To Offering Lifetime Annuities In Pension Plans, Jonathan Barry Forman

Connecticut Insurance Law Journal

No abstract provided.

It Saves To Be Healthy: Using The Tax Code To Incentivize Employer-Provided Wellness Benefits, Hilary R. Shepherd

Indiana Law Journal

With lifestyle-related disease on the rise and an increasing number of employers being held responsible for providing health insurance to their employees, we as a society have incentives to promote wellness, even if only to cut health care costs. Part I of this Note outlines a brief history of employer-provided wellness benefits and provides a concise summary of the employer-provided wellness benefits available. Part II analyzes the relevant federal income tax law, specifically, the fringe benefits provision of the Internal Revenue Code, and concludes that under existing tax law, on-premises gym facilities do not yield any taxable income to employees, …

Is It Time To Adopt A No-Fault Scheme To Compensate Injured Patients?, Elaine Gibson

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The tort system is roundly indicted for its inadequacies in providing compensation in response to injury. More egregious is its response to injuries incurred due to negligence in the provision of healthcare services specifically. Despite numerous calls for reform, tort-based compensation has persisted as the norm to date. However, recent developments regarding physician malpractice lead to consideration of the possibility of a move to “no-fault” compensation for healthcare-related injuries. In this paper, I explore these developments, examine programs in various foreign jurisdictions which have adopted no-fault compensation for medical injury, and discuss the wisdom and feasibility of adopting an administratively-based …

The Perverse Effects Of Subsidized Weather Insurance, Omri Ben-Shahar, Kyle D. Logue

Articles

This Article explores the role of insurance as a substitute for direct regulation of risks posed by severe weather. In pricing the risk of human activity along the predicted path of storms, insurance can provide incentives for efficient location decisions as well as for cost-justified mitigation efforts in building construction and infrastructure. Currently, however, much insurance for severe-weather risks is provided and heavily subsidized by the government. This Article demonstrates two primary distortions arising from the government’s dominance in these insurance markets. First, existing government subsidies are allocated differentially across households, resulting in a significant regressive redistribution favoring affluent homeowners …

Pension De-Risking, Brendan Maher

Faculty Articles and Papers

The United States is facing a retirement crisis, in significant part because defined benefit pension plans have been replaced by defined contribution retirement plans that, whatever their theoretical merit, have left significant numbers of workers unprepared for retirement. A troubling example of the continuing movement away from defined benefit plans is a new phenomenon euphemistically called “pension de-risking.” Recent years have been marked by high-profile companies engaging in various actions designed to reduce the company’s exposure to pension funding risk (hence the term “pension de-risking”). Some de-risking strategies convert a federally-guaranteed pension into a more risky private annuity. Other approaches …

The Uneasy Case For Food Safety Liability Insurance, John Aloysius Cogan, Jr.

Faculty Articles and Papers

No abstract provided.

The Future Of The Cadillac Tax, Kathryn L. Moore

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The Affordable Care Act includes a 40 percent excise tax on high-cost employer-sponsored health care coverage. Often referred to as the “Cadillac tax,” this excise tax is one of the most controversial elements of the Affordable Care Act.

Currently scheduled to go into effect in 2020, the Cadillac tax poses serious challenges and uncertainty for employers. On the one hand, recent estimates suggest that the Cadillac tax may hit as many as 20 percent of employers with health care plans in 2020. On the other hand, there is a serious question as to whether the tax will be repealed before …

The Pension Mis-Selling Scandal, The Sec, And The Fiduciary Standard, John A. Turner

Connecticut Insurance Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Regulating Home Equity Protection Companies And Contracts: Are States Making “The Best” An Enemy Of “The Good”?, John E. Marthinsen

Connecticut Insurance Law Journal

No abstract provided.

A Closer Look At The Iras In State Automatic Enrollment Ira Programs, Kathryn L. Moore

Connecticut Insurance Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Friedrichs And The Move Toward Private Ordering Of Wages And Benefits In The Public Sector, Maria O'Brien Hylton

Connecticut Insurance Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Do Credit-Based Insurance Scores Proxy For Income In Predicting Auto Claim Risk?, Darcy Steeg Morris, Daniel Schwarcz, Joshua C. Teitelbaum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Auto insurers often use credit-based insurance scores in their underwriting and rating processes. The practice is controversial—many consumer groups oppose it, and most states regulate it, in part out of concern that insurance scores proxy for policyholder income in predicting claim risk. We offer new evidence on this issue in the context of auto insurance. Prior studies on the subject suffer from the limitation that they rely solely on aggregate measures of income, such as the median income in a policyholder's census tract or zip code. We analyze a panel of households that purchased auto and home policies from a …

In Praise Of (Some) Ex Post Regulation: A Response To Professor Galle, Kyle D. Logue

Articles

According to modern law-and-economics (“L&E”) orthodoxy, the primary—maybe even the only—legitimate justification for government regulation is to correct a market failure. This conclusion is based on two key assumptions. First, when markets are functioning reasonably well, they are better at achieving efficiency than the government is. Second, most markets function reasonably well most of the time. Although there is probably evidence to support these assumptions (for example, the relative prosperity of market-based economies in comparison with the relative poverty of centrally planned economies), both assumptions are usually taken as articles of faith by mainstream L&E scholars. This is why scholarly …

Private Dollars For Public Litigation: An Introduction, Anthony J. Sebok

Articles

The article argues that litigation investment—where third-party funders provide capital for lawsuits in exchange for a share of potential recoveries—should be extended to public litigation. It contends that the economic rationale for litigation investment applies equally to public entities, such as state Attorneys General, as it does to private litigants. The author highlights the funding gap in public litigation, particularly in large-scale cases against well-resourced defendants, and suggests that litigation investment could address this gap more effectively than contingent fee arrangements with private attorneys.

Single Payer And The Rising Cost Of Health Care, Brianna Paolicelli

Cardozo Public Law, Policy & Ethics Journal

The New York Health Act proposes a single-payer healthcare system aimed at providing universal coverage by eliminating private insurers and reducing administrative costs. The Act, persistently advocated by Assemblyman Richard Gottfried since 1992, passed the State Assembly in 2015 but faces opposition, particularly from the insurance industry and the Republican Senate. Despite challenges, the Act is supported by economic research indicating significant cost savings and improved efficiency, drawing on international successes like Canada and Taiwan. It addresses historical and contemporary healthcare issues, offering a comprehensive solution to the state's healthcare needs.