176. Blockheads. Guests, Nicole Huberfeld and Rachel Sachs.

Nicole Huberfeld is Professor of Health Law, Ethics & Human Rights at the School of Public Health and Professor of Law at the School of Law. Her scholarship focuses the cross-section of health law and constitutional law with emphasis on health reform, federalism in health care (especially Medicaid), and the federal spending power. She is the co-author of 2 leading casebooks, The Law of American Health Care and Public Health Law, Her scholarship is as voluminous as it is remarkable. In 2019, she won the Excellence in Teaching Award at BU School of Public Health.

Rachel Sachs is a Professor at Washington University in St Louis. She is a scholar of innovation policy whose work explores the interaction of intellectual property law, food and drug regulation, and health law. Her work explores problems of innovation and access to new health care technologies. Professor Sachs’ scholarship has appeared in major law reviews and health policy journals. Before entering the world of teaching and researching she clerked for the Hon. Richard A. Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

Our sole topic of conversation; in a Dear Medicaid Director letter dated January 30, 2020 The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) invited applications from the states via a waiver mechanism, the so-called Section 1115 waiver, to replace their Medicaid Expansion programs with a type of “block grant”, branded by CMS as its “Healthy Adult Opportunity.”

Must read scholarship by my guests include The Problematic Law and Policy of Medicaid Block Grants, Limiting State Flexibility in Drug Pricing, this “The Hill” op-ed., Stewart v Azar and the Purpose of Medicaid: Work as a Condition of Enrollment, and Health Care and the Myth of Self-Reliance, all linked from TWIHL.com