Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2-1-2011
Abstract
This essay explores the new social contract of healthcare solidarity through private ownership, markets, choice, and individual responsibility embodied in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. This essay first explains the four main health care risk distribution institutions affected by the Act – Medicare, Medicaid, the individual and small employer market, and the large group market – with an emphasis on how the Act changes those institutions and how they are financed. The essay then describes the “fair share” approach to health care financing embodied in the Act. This approach largely rejects the actuarial fairness vision of what constitutes a fair share while pointing toward a new responsibility to be as healthy as you can. This new responsibility reflects the influence of health economics and health ethics, and it is part of the embrace of risk first described in the insurance as governance literature. There are challenges to achieving the solidarity through individual responsibility envisioned in the Act – most significantly ”risk classification by design” and non-compliance with the mandates – but the Act contains regulatory tools that the states, the new Exchanges, and the Department of Health and Human Services can use to address these challenges.
Keywords
Health law, health care, insurance, insurance law, Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
Publication Title
University of Pennsylvania Law Review
Repository Citation
Baker, Tom, "Health Insurance, Risk, and Responsibility after the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act" (2011). All Faculty Scholarship. 342.
https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/342
Included in
Community Health and Preventive Medicine Commons, Health Economics Commons, Health Law and Policy Commons, Health Services Administration Commons, Insurance Commons, Insurance Law Commons, Public Economics Commons
Publication Citation
159 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1577 (2011).