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 economic inequality in the United States has reached unprecedented heights, reformers have focused considerable attention on changes in the law that would provide for greater equality in wealth among Americans. More equitable tax policies, fairer workplace regulation, and more generous...

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 —...

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 observers have focused on questions about the extent to which the Affordable Care Act (ACA) will improve access to care, reduce the costs of care, and improve the quality of care, commentary has largely ignored an even more important question — to what extent will ACA improve health?...

While the Affordable Care Act (ACA) will do much to improve access to health care, it may do far less to address other problems in health care and health. For example, scholars have questioned whether ACA will have a big enough impact on health care costs. This article considers another...

Contract theory offers a simple and wildly effective solution to surprise bills: Hospital admissions contracts are contracts with open price terms, which contract law imputes with market rates. This solution not only obviated the costly, time-consuming, and complicated (and still unimplemented)...

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...