ERISA and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) – Chicago, IL

July 27, 2011 - CALLS FOR PAPERS, Constitutional Law, Health Law, Tax Law - Tagged:

The Center for Tax Law & Employee Benefits at The John Marshall Law School and The John Marshall Law Review present The Intersection of ERISA and PPACA Laws: Do the Two Fit Together? April 16, 2012. Paper proposals are due Oct. 1, 2011.

Announcing a one-day symposium for leading scholars and policy makers, with papers to be published in The John Marshall Law Review, spring 2012 edition

When: Monday, April 16, 2012

Where: The John Marshall Law School, Chicago, IL

Sponsored by the Center for Tax Law & Employee Benefits at The John Marshall Law School and The John Marshall Law Review

Topics Included:

When ERISA (the Employee Retirement Income Security Act) was passed back in 1974, the policy was to impose standards of conduct designed to protect the interests of participants and beneficiaries covered under employee benefit plans and to provide remedies, sanctions and access to the federal courts when those standards were breached. The establishment and maintenance of such benefits remained voluntary on the part of private employers, as well as the level of benefits extended. In contrast, the policy behind the new health care reform legislation through PPACA (Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010) is to mandate certain health care benefits, expand health insurance coverage and control health care costs. Yet how ERISA and PPACA will work together is any one’s guess. It will be the jobs of the federal agencies and the courts to resolve their differences.  This symposium will be a forum for academics from all specialties (professors at law schools, business schools, public policy schools, and other relevant concentrations) to opine on the differences between the two laws and

While PPACA’s future is still uncertain – ranging from its constitutionality to its impact on state regulated insurance – academics will have the ability to shape how the law is framed and interpreted through their innovative scholarship. Many professors are currently writing on the evolving land scape, and we are certain that through a national call for papers, we can assemble a panel of academics researching and writing on a broad spectrum of legal and legally-related issues involving the intersection of ERISA and PPACA, including such topics as:

  • The constitutionality of PPACA;
  • The role of state versus federal law in interpreting PPACA versus ERISA’s federal preemption clause;
  • Mandated nature of benefits under PPACA and penalties for noncompliance versus the voluntary nature of benefits under ERISA and its remedies;
  • The benefit review process and the resulting judicial standard of review under PPACA versus ERISA and its role in providing benefits to participants/beneficiaries;
  • The role of actuarial principles in determining benefits and costs under PPACA versus ERISA; and
  • The portability of health insurance under PPACA versus the limited nature of portability under HIPPA.

Call For Papers: Researchers working on these topics or others related to the general theme of the symposium, are encouraged to submit a proposal for inclusion. Proposals should include paper title and a brief description of the project to be submitted to Professor Kathryn Kennedy, Director for the Center for Tax Law & Employee Benefits no later than October 1, 2011. Proposals will be reviewed and researches will be notified of the decision no later than November 1, 2011. To provide time for participants to review all the papers in advance of the April 16, 2012 symposium, papers are due by March 15, 2012.

Vision for the Symposium: April 16, 2012 marks the date for The Tenth Annual Employee Benefits Symposium. The goal is to have the presenters summarize their papers over a 45-minute session, leaving 15 minutes for the other authors to comment. Papers presented at the symposium will then be published in The John Marshall Law Review’s Symposium edition.

Conference Organizers:

Kathryn J. Kennedy, The John Marshall Law School, kkennedy [at] jmls.edu, 312.987.1418

Barry Kozak, The John Marshall Law School, bkozak [at] jmls.edu, 312.987.2524

For further information, contact Steve Szydelko, Program Coordinator for the Center for Tax Law & Employee Benefits, sszydelko [at] jmls.edu.

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