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Vulnerability Theory and Health Justice

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By Matthew B. Lawrence

If we want to understand how changes to the law might affect health outcomes, we must remain mindful that the law not only regulates how we behave in the world as it is, but also shapes the institutions and structures that make the world the way it is.

The dominant theoretical frameworks of classical liberalism and behavioral economics obscure this critical relationship.

In this blog post, I suggest that health justice and vulnerability theory fill this theoretical gap, and serve as invaluable, and largely complementary, frameworks for understanding health law and policy.

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Congress Should Insulate the Indian Health Service from the Next Government Shutdown

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By Matthew B. Lawrence

Contributors to Bill of Health’s symposium on Recommendations for a Biden/Harris Health Policy Agenda have made a number of excellent suggestions. I have one more policy suggestion to add and endorse: Congress should adopt the Biden Administration’s recent proposal to insulate the Indian Health Service from future government shutdowns.

A service population of 2.5 million American Indians and Alaska Natives rely on the federally-funded Indian Health Service (IHS). The IHS is one of several trust obligations that the U.S. government owes Native peoples as a result “of Native Americans ceding over 400 million acres of tribal land to the United States pursuant to promises and agreements that included providing health care services,” as the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights put it.

Yet the IHS is dependent entirely on annual one-year appropriations from Congress. That means that the House and the Senate must come together, on time, every single year on an appropriations package, for the IHS to continue all its operations.

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Advantages of Using the Congressional Review Act to Revoke Health Care Waivers

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By Matthew B. Lawrence

The Trump Administration has granted health care waivers that the Biden Administration will surely look to end, including work requirement waivers that the Supreme Court is going to consider in Azar v. Gresham. How the Biden Administration approaches this task may set precedents that last far into the future, which is one argument in favor of considering the Congressional Review Act as a potential path forward.

Waivers are a huge part of health policy. They entail a state seeking approval from the federal government to make various changes to ACA or Medicaid programs. Waivers are normally approved for several years at a time, and routinely renewed. They foster experimentation, and are also (or especially) a tool the federal government uses to steer national health policy by pushing states to adopt some reforms and not others, as I explain in a forthcoming article.

Over at the Yale Journal of Regulation blog, I describe how the Congressional Review Act (CRA) could potentially be used to revoke health care waivers (like community engagement, aka work requirement, waivers).

In brief, the CRA is a way Congress can change the law to revoke agency actions without the votes necessary to override a filibuster. The CRA might be a cleaner alternative for revoking health care waivers than administrative revocation by the Biden Administration. One big policy advantage of this route is that it wouldn’t come back to haunt health policy. Revocations through the administrative process would set a precedent that could undermine the stability of all waivers, but revocations through the CRA would not.

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Concerns Raised by ‘Georgia Access’ 1332 Waiver Application

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By Matthew B. Lawrence and Haley Gintis

Georgia has applied to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for a waiver under the Affordable Care Act that would allow it to reshape its private health insurance marketplace.

HHS is accepting comments on the application through September 23, 2020. Commenters so far have raised various issues, including concerns about how the waiver would, if granted, impact access to treatment for mental illness and behavioral health conditions such as substance use disorder.

This blog post summarizes the revised waiver in Part I, changes from the original in Part II, and recent comments about its desirability in Part III.

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Recovery Navigators: How an Overlooked ACA Program Could Be a Tool in Addressing the Opioid Crisis

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By Matthew J.B. Lawrence

benefits

Research indicates that one of many challenges in addressing the opioid epidemic is getting people who are theoretically eligible for government-funded drug abuse treatment through CHIP or Medicaid to actually make use of those programs when their sickness or circumstances give them a window of opportunity to try to get help. The hassle of actually enrolling in these programs—knowing they are there, filling out the paperwork, having access to available information, and having the patience to navigate the process—is one impediment. The ACA’s sometimes-overlooked “Navigator” program could help. The ACA provision creating the program is broad enough for HHS to use it to award grants to community groups to serve as recovery navigators, enrolling addicts in Medicaid, CHIP, or Exchange coverage for substance abuse treatment.

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Grading the ACA as Equal Protection Statute

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The Affordable Care Act is sprawling.  Some of its myriad provisions may (or may not!) reduce healthcare costs.  Think of accountable care organizations, the hospital readmission reduction program, or even the preventive services mandate.  And so, the Act’s success is often evaluated by asking whether it has helped reduce healthcare costs.  (See, e.g., David Cutler here.)

Other of the ACA’s provisions are intended to promote financial security in the face of illness.  The Act’s most litigated provisions, requiring that people buy insurance, expanding Medicaid, and creating exchanges, can be understood primarily in this light.  And so, the Act’s success is also often evaluated by asking whether it has truly promoted financial security.  (See today’s New York Times piece from Margoret Sangor-Katz on the subject of underinsurance post-ACA, or Aaron E. Carroll’s take from December.)

A third way of understanding the ACA’s reforms–and evaluating its success or failure–too often gets left out (as it was by the NY Times here): The ACA can perhaps most coherently be thought of as an equal protection statute.

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Regulating Wellness Through Employers: Mitigating the Knowledge Gap

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Some of the behavioral changes that the Affordable Care Act seeks to bring about are prompted directly by the Act or a federal agency acting pursuant to the Act.  The “individual mandate” that people buy health insurance is one example; individuals who do not change their behavior to comply with that particular provision of the law are subject to a tax penalty imposed by the IRS.

But much of the work of the ACA is done through regulatory intermediaries that are themselves incentivized by the Act to find ways to bring about the end-user behavioral changes that the ACA is really after.  Medicaid expansion is a straightforward example–under the ACA the federal government does not provide insurance coverage to those who make less than 133% of the federal poverty line, rather, it incentivizes states to do so.  Accountable Care Organizations are another somewhat more roundabout example: the Act incentivizes doctors to form organizations that will themselves incentivize doctors to coordinate care and patients to obtain more value-maximizing services.

Like any principal-agent relationship, regulating through an intermediary has benefits and costs.  The intermediary (state, employer, insurer, doctor, etc.) may be differently positioned than the federal government to obtain information about, and influence the behavior of, the actors whose collective behavior we ultimately care about, for better or worse.  And certain intermediaries may be differently responsive to the concerns of those impacted by the policies they enact than the federal government, again for better or worse. Read More

UPDATE: Death Spirals…Really to the Rescue?

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UPDATE: I posted what follows in January, reflecting on the JALSA amicus brief led by Prof. Abigail Moncrieff from BU that argues that petitioners’ interpretation in King v. Burwell would make the ACA unconstitutional by forcing states to choose between establishing exchanges and torpedoing their individual health insurance markets.  In other words, “death spirals to the rescue.”  It looks like that argument got noticed by Justice Kennedy, who pressed the petitioners hard for a response at oral argument this morning.  (See here.)  A very interesting development, and congratulations are in order to Abby and the other JALSA signatories (as well as other amici who pressed this argument) for at the very least helping to call attention to an argument that wound up playing big at argument.  Will be interesting to see how the opinion comes out!

ORIGINAL POST (Jan. 27, 2015):

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 Court’s latest ACA case, have been predicting that a ruling against the government there would be disastrous because it would only exacerbate the “death spiral” threat to individual health insurance markets.  (See a sum-up of such predictions here.)

But could death spirals save the ACA?  According to a fascinating amicus brief filed in the King case by a number of interest groups and co-signed by several prominent law professors and Bill of Health contributors (I understand that Abigail Moncrieff is the driving force behind the brief, joined by Allison Hoffman, Sharona Hoffman, Russell Korobkin, Joan Krause, Stephen Marks,  Kevin Outterson, and Theodore Ruger), the answer might be yes.  The argument boils down to “death spirals to the rescue.”  (Here is a copy: 14-114 bsac JALSA.)

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Death Spirals…to the Rescue!

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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 Court’s latest ACA case, have been predicting that a ruling against the government there would be disastrous because it would only exacerbate the “death spiral” threat to individual health insurance markets.  (See a sum-up of such predictions here.)

But could death spirals save the ACA?  According to a fascinating amicus brief filed in the King case by a number of interest groups and co-signed by several prominent law professors and Bill of Health contributors (I understand that Abigail Moncrieff is the driving force behind the brief, joined by Allison Hoffman, Sharona Hoffman, Russell Korobkin, Joan Krause, Stephen Marks,  Kevin Outterson, and Theodore Ruger), the answer might be yes.  The argument boils down to “death spirals to the rescue.”  (Here is a copy: 14-114 bsac JALSA.)

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