The Future of Healthcare Reform in the United States

In the years since the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA, or, colloquially, Obamacare), most of the discussion about it has been political. But as the politics fade and the law’s many complex provisions take effect, a much more interesting question begins to emerge: How will the law affect the American health care regime in the coming years and decades?

This book brings together fourteen leading scholars from the fields of law, economics, medicine, and public health to answer that question. Taking discipline-specific views, they offer their analyses and predictions for the future of health care reform. By turns thought-provoking, counterintuitive, and even contradictory, the essays together cover the landscape of positions on the PPACA’s prospects. Some see efficiency growth and moderating prices; others fear a strangling bureaucracy and spiraling costs. The result is a deeply informed, richly substantive discussion that will trouble settled positions and lay the groundwork for analysis and assessment as the law’s effects begin to become clear.