Historically, government has been given more leeway when invoking its interests in safeguarding the public health than when asserting other state interests. For example, when considering a constitutional challenge to mandatory small pox immunization in Jacobson v. Massachusetts, the Supreme...

Critics of the individual mandate to purchase health care insurance make a simple but seemingly compelling argument. If the federal government can require people to buy insurance because that would be good for their health, then the government can require people to buy all sorts of things that...

Richard Epstein, in his book Mortal Peril, supports euthanasia and assisted suicide and rejects the distinction between them and withdrawal of treatment. In this essay, Professor Orentlicher argues that Epstein is correct in finding no meaningful moral distinction between euthanasia and...

Once touted as the answer to defects in fee-for-service health care insurance, managed care has seen its fortunes rise and fall over the past decade. Initially, managed care techniques became widespread, and they slowed the growth in health care costs. Indeed, premiums for health care insurance...

For the first fifty years of its existence, Medicaid suffered from a serious defect. While it was adopted to meet the health care needs of the poor, it only met the needs of the so-called “deserving” poor — children, pregnant women, single caretakers of children, and disabled persons —...

For some time, it has been common for policy experts to criticize the U.S. health care system’s reliance on employer-sponsored insurance. For individuals, access to health care coverage before enactment of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) often depended on employment with companies that provided...

As state governments respond to the needs of their aging populations, an issue of particular concern is health care at the end of life. With the many advances in public health and medical treatment — as well as in education, wealth, and other socioeconomic metrics — Americans are living much...

While health care cost inflation slowed during the past few years, it has started to pick up again, and policy makers have good cause for concern about future increases in health care spending. Moreover, even if future increases moderate, policy makers rightly worry about the already high levels...

As prosecutors have increasingly invoked asset forfeiture laws in their war against crime, scholars have harshly criticized the use of forfeiture laws to seize attorneys' fees. In cases in which attorneys' fees are seized, prosecutors claim that defendants are paying their lawyers with the...