By Tony Caldwell and Christopher Robertson This new post by Tony Caldwell and Christopher Robertson appears on the Health Affairs Blog, as part of a series stemming from the Third Annual Health Law Year in P/Review event held at Harvard Law School on Friday, January 30, 2015. The Physician Payments Sunshine Act, a provision in the Affordable Care Act, seeks to increase…
By Abbe Gluck Next week the Court hears a major challenge to Obamacare, King v. Burwell. Readers of this blog know the case has deep importance for health care. But it also is a big case for law. I have previously detailed why the case is the big test for the Court’s current text-oriented statutory-interpretation…
A new New England Journal of Medicine commentary by Peter A. Ubel, M.D., David A. Comerford, Ph.D., and Eric Johnson, Ph.D. highlights significant flaws in the way information is presented to insurance shoppers on state and federal exchange websites. The authors present original survey data to support the argument that subtle aspects of current website designs…
By David Orentlicher [Cross-posted at HealthLawProfs] In announcing the federal government’s approval of Indiana’s Medicaid expansion, Governor Mike Pence invoked common sense in defending his insistence that beneficiaries shoulder a share of their health care premiums. According to Pence, “It’s just common sense that when people take greater ownership of their health care, they make…
By Matthew Lawrence We’ve heard a lot about “death spirals” and how they could stand in the way of the Affordable Care Act’s goal of a functioning individual health insurance marketplace. Seth Chandler has an interesting blog devoted to the subject, “ACA Death Spiral.” And those who have been following King v. Burwell, the Supreme…
By Nicolas Terry Today, the Washington Post ran an interview with Laurence Tribe about the King v. Burwell subsidy litigation (recall that oral arguments are scheduled for March 4). Tribe speculated that Chief Justice Roberts will once again be the swing vote, as he was in Nat’l Fed. of Independent Bus. v. Sebelius. Tribe seems to predict…
By Greg Curfman, Holly Fernandez Lynch and I. Glenn Cohen This new blog post by Greg Curfman, Holly Fernandez Lynch and I. Glenn Cohen appears on the Health Affairs Blog: Everywhere we look, we see the tremendous impact of new legal developments—whether regulatory or statutory, federal or state—on health and health care. These topics range from insurance to intellectual…
By David Orentlicher[Cross-posted at Health Law Profs.] With Harvard professors protesting their increased responsibility for health care costs, we are seeing just the most visible aspect of the recurring cycle described in “Tragic Choices.” As Guido Calabresi and Philip Bobbitt observed in that book, society tries to defuse societal conflict by hiding its rationing choices through implicit forms…
By Nicolas Terry Health reform may have signaled the shift from hospital-based “sick” care to primary care and “wellness” but the ACA failed to provide a detailed roadmap. All we know for sure is that primary care (PC) will be hugely important. Increasingly it also seems that it will look quite different. “Old” PC is being…
Population health advocates have identified health care providers, and hospitals in particular, as key allies in the effort to create better health and longer lives for Americans nationwide. Despite a growing interest in “community-based’ models of care, hospitals remain the most visible component of the US health care system. What’s more, hospitals are where the…
