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Assigned Reading: Health Care (Class # 14, Feb. 27)
- Read Sallie Thieme Sanford, The Struggle to Bury Pre-Existing Condition Consideration, 7 St. Louis U. J. Health L. & Poly' 405. This short law journal —articlepublished the year the ACA’s key access provisions went into effect—includes information about Washington State’s individual market in the 2000s.
- Read a recent newspaper article summarizing the key political and practical issues Congress faces in trying to craft a replacement proposal for the ACA, e.g.:
- Robert Pear, Issues Facing Republicans in Replacing Affordable Care Act, N.Y. Times, Feb. 7, 2017.
- Noam N. Levey, Republicans divided over whether millions of Americans should lose government-subsidized health coverage, L.A. Times, Jan. 26, 2017.
- Anna Wilde Mathews & Louise Radnofsky, Health Care's Bipartisan Problem: The Sick Are Expensive and Someone Has to Pay; With Congress poised to repeal the Affordable Care Act, most lawmakers want to maintain coverage for people with pre-existing conditions--the available options all have downsides, Wall St. J., Jan. 12, 2017 [UW Restricted].
- Law Professor Tim Jost writes frequently for the Health Affairs blog and has a series of posts about the ACA and, more recently, about what the Trump administration and Republican Congress might do regarding health reform. He also writes for the Health Affairs journal. In particular, please read Timothy Stoltzfus Jost,, First Steps of Repeal, Replace, and Repair, Health Affairs, Feb. 2017. [The blog is available to anyone; the journal is UW Restricted.]
- On December 2, 2016, House Republican leaders sent a letter to state governors and insurance commissioners asking for their input and recommendations related to health reform in the new Congress. Please read that letter, the response from Washington State’s governor and insurance commissioner, and the response from Florida’s governor.
- The Kaiser Family Foundation has posted a comparison of proposals to replace the Affordable Care Act, including
- The “Empowering Patients First Act” (the bill introduced by Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, MD when he was a representative)
- The “A Better Way” proposal (Representative Paul Ryan’s plan).
- If a prominent replacement bill is introduced before our class session, it will also be summarized there.
- Please compare the portions of these summaries that focus on Medicaid, insurance subsidies, individual mandates, pre-existing condition protections, employer mandates, and insurance coverage requirements. You might also find it helpful to poke around that website for health reform-related information of interest.
- Watch Julie Rovner & Francis Ying, A Guide to Budget Reconciliation: The Byzantine Rules for Disassembling the Health Law, Kaiser Health News, Feb. 6, 2017: