In this episode, Matthew Lawrence, Assistant Professor of Law at Pennsylvania State University Dickinson Law School and affiliate of the Harvard Law Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics, discusses his article "The Social Consequences Problem in Health Insurance and How to Solve It," forthcoming in the Harvard Law & Policy Review. Lawrence begins by defining the social consequences problem in health insurance, in that a combination of economic, emotional, and social consequences combine to provide additional stresses on patients and their loved ones. He details how the status quo of medical coverage, where patients must pay co-pays and deductibles out of pocket directly to medical providers, creates perverse incentives for providers who now hold a status of both practitioner and bill collector. He provides an account of how the legal environment of healthcare coverage developed and discusses potential solutions and their challenges to the social consequences problem. And he concludes by discussing what insurers, providers, and policymakers should take away when trying to address this issue. Lawrence is on Twitter at @mjblawrence.

This episode was hosted by Luce Nguyen, a college student and the co-founder of the Oberlin Policy Research Institute, an undergraduate public policy research organization at Oberlin College. Nguyen is on Twitter at @NguyenLuce.

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