This Article interrogates the current and future role of employer-sponsored health insurance in reproductive autonomy, revealing the impact that employers’ coverage choices have on access to reproductive care and the legal infrastructure that prioritizes employer choice over individual autonomy.
Over half of the population depends on employers for health insurance. Laws regulating employer plans give employers exceptionally wide latitude...
COVID-19 has killed over one million Americans, and its massive impact on society is still unfolding. The government’s strategy to combat the disease included an order regulating the wearing of masks on transit. Recently, a federal district court vacated the government’s transit mask order, ruling that the order exceeds the statutory authority of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The district court relied heavily on the statute’s...
Various forces are driving healthcare providers to pursue integration to reduce prices and improve efficiency. Right now, the dominant payment model for healthcare is fee-for-service, in which a patient is charged for each individual service, test, or visit. An alternative model is value-based care, in which the emphasis is on value as opposed to volume. But to provide value-based care, health systems generally must be integrated enough to connect...
The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the severe public health danÂger that institutional and congregate care settings pose to people with disÂabilities, older adults, and the care professionals who work in those settings. While the populations residing in congregate care settings are naturally more susceptible to the virus, the COVID-19 crisis in these setÂtings could have been far more limited if there had been broader access to home and community-based...
Race and medicine scholarship is beset by a conundrum. On one hand, some racial justice scholars and advocates frame the harms that racial minorities experience through a medical lens. Poverty and homeÂlessness are social determinants of health that medical frameworks should account for. Racism itself is a public health threat. On the other hand, other scholars treat medicine with skepticism. Medical frameworks, they argue, will reify racially...
“If I can be provocative, shouldn’t this study be done in Africa, where there are no masks, no treatment, no intensive care, a bit like some studies on AIDS or among prostitutes. We try things, because we know they . . . are highly exposed and they don’t protect themselves. What do you think about that?” Jean-Paul Mira, […]
The COVID-19 crisis has tragically revealed the depth of racial inequities in the United States. This Piece argues that the disproportionÂate impact of the pandemic on racial minorities is a symptom of a failing approach to public health, one that privileges individual behaviors over the structural conditions that generate vulnerability and inequitable health outcomes. Despite clear racial disparities in illness and deaths, the...
The 2010s have been a momentous decade for Medicaid. With enrollment of over seventy-two million people (19% of the country’s population), Medicaid is the nation’s largest public health insurance program, and it is the primary or sole source of health insurance for vulnerable groups such as low-income children and pregnant women, adults with disabilities, and […]
The Constitution has long protected the rights of individuals to procreate and parent, free from government intrusion. But as new technologies stretch the boundaries of what it means to create a family, the scope of these rights have come into question. Specifically, modern advances in genetic modification will soon allow parents to make direct modifications to particular embryos. The possibility of such advances gives rise to questions about how...