New Blog: ACA Death Spiral: Exploring the Likely Implosion of the Affordable Care Act

University of Houston law professor Seth J. Chandler last week launched his blog, ACA Death Spiral: Exploring the Likely Implosion of the Affordable Care Act, with the following post:

This blog is going to chronicle what I believe will be the implosion of the Affordable Care Act.  I do not believe the Exchange based system of providing health insurance without medical underwriting is likely to work or that, if it does, it will not need far more massive propping up from federal taxes than is conventionally recognized. We’ll be looking at current events, the history of the Act, important court cases, and regulatory developments. Our tools will be a careful review of primary documents, some graphical and mathematical analyses, and references to important and insightful articles written by others.

Also, there is more to the Affordable Care Act than the Exchanges.  There is more than the individual mandate. There is the employer mandate, the complex systems of federal reinsurance needed to backstop the Act, the reintroduction of medical underwriting under the “wellness label” and so much more.  We’ll try as time permits to take a look at developments in these important areas too.

I recognize that many are writing on this topic and that it will be hard to stay a pace of such a fast moving target.  But I do feel that there is a need for some hard and at least somewhat scientific look at what is going on.  It will be my goal and burden to try to provide that in the months ahead.

Oh, and who am I?  I’m Seth Chandler, a law professor at the University of Houston Law Center.  I’ve taught insurance law, including life and health insurance law, for many years, been a co-director of the Health Law & Policy Institute, and done considerable work on the economics of insurance and its regulation.  I’ve been very active using Mathematica, a system for doing mathematics by computer, and have shown how this tool can be used to analyze legal systems and many issues in insurance law such as adverse selection, moral hazard, correlated risk and a variety of issues in life, health, property and casualty insurance.