Many reform proposals call for the creation of one or more health insurance exchanges, intermediaries that can help individuals or small employers navigate the insurance market. An exchange might be public or private, national or local. It might serve simply as a clearinghouse for plan information or could play an active role in setting benefit packages, choosing high-quality plans, and negotia...

Using both employer- and beneficiary-level data, we examined trends in employer-sponsored retiree health insurance and prospects for future coverage. We found that retiree health insurance has become less prevalent over the past decade, with firms reporting declines in the availability of coverage, and Medicare-eligible retirees reporting lower rates of enrollment. The future of retiree health ...

Insurance claim practices determine the extent to which insurers will or will not honor their promises. This Article describes the failure in the market for claim practices, the failure of the regulatory responses to that failure, and the ways in which litigation can provide a partial corrective. The Article explains why the market fails to guarantee fair claim practices, how market forces migh...

This paper describes a study of content and communication processes in multidisciplinary meetings of healthcare professionals, using a Human Factors engineering approach. The goal of the study, which took place in a teaching hospital Toronto, Canada, was to understand the processes of collaboration and information exchange that take place in the meetings, and to identify potential supports for ...

Health information exchanges (HIEs) are expected to facilitate collaboration between healthcare entities and improve efficiency and quality of care through enhanced information sharing capabilities. Privacy concerns have been consistently cited as one of the primary challenges to HIE development and adoption. Currently, it is unclear how privacy laws – in particular, legislation restricting the...

On March 23, 2010 President Barack Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (hereinafter “ACA”) into law. The enactment of the ACA was an enormous step in the history of the United States, as “no prior administration had successfully pushed national health reform through Congress, despite several attempts.” The Act was created with the primary goal of providing all American c...