Expanding dependent coverage for young adults: lessons from state initiatives

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) requires that adults up to age twenty-six be permitted to enroll as dependents on their parents' health plans. This article examines the experiences of states that enacted dependent expansion laws. Drawing on public information from thirty-one enacting states and case studies of four diverse reform states, it derives lessons that are pertinent to the implementation of this ACA provision. Dependent coverage laws vary across the states, but most impose residency, marital status, and other restrictions. The federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act further limits the reach of state laws. Eligibility for expanded coverage under the ACA is much broader. Rules in some states requiring or allowing separate premiums for adult dependents may also discourage enrollment compared with rules in other states (and the ACA), where these costs must be factored into family premiums. Business opposition in some states led to more restrictive regulations, especially for how premiums are charged, which in turn raised greater implementation challenges. Case study states did not report substantial young adult dependent coverage take-up, but early enrollment experience under ACA appears to be more positive. Long-term questions remain about the implications of this policy for risk pooling and the distribution of premium costs.     

Bystander reaction to women fighting: developing a theory of intervention

This article explores accounts of bystanders to female-on-female public violence. Group interviews with participants in the night-time economy are carried out. Whereas men tend to respond to the discussion topic of female-on-female violence with laughter, this laughter reveals ambivalence and discomfort as much as amusement. Men seem to negotiate the tension between the expectation that they should intervene in emergencies and a catalogue of costs that attend intervention. Female bystanders appear to have a different set of concerns. They talk about feelings of shame at the interpersonal and the group level. Women cite the public spectacle, and the opportunity for men to demean or sexualize women, as reasons for intervention. The article concludes with some recommendations about the importance of exploring female violence in its own terms, beginning with a series of identified moral and social dilemmas incurred within possible third-party intervention.     

A multi-winner nested rent-seeking contest

Public Choice - This paper considers a symmetric imperfectly discriminating rent-seeking contest in which there may be several winners. We first demonstrate a serious flaw in previous work and then...     

Reviews

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Adolescent Female Athletes' Sexual Risk-Taking Behaviors

Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) 1993 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance (YRBS) of a sample of U.S. female adolescents (N = 7839) were compared to a cohort of 9th through 12th grade high performance female athletes (N = 141) with regard to risk-taking behavior on eight items related to sexual activity (i.e., ever engaged in sexual intercourse, age of first sexual intercourse, number of lifetime sexual partners, current sexual activity, condom use, use of the birth control pill, contracting a sexually transmitted disease (STD), and incidence of alcohol or drug use prior to last sexual activity). Chi-square analyses (p < .05) showed that with the exception of alcohol or drug use prior to last sexual activity, and use of birth control pills, the six other risk-taking behaviors were significantly different between the U.S. female sample and the female athletes. In all instances, except for contracting an STD, U.S. females reported engaging in sexual risk-taking behaviors more frequently than the high performance athletes, and furthermore, were more likely to be sexually active than the high performance athletes (50% vs. 21%). Among the high performance athletes, only lifetime sexual activity showed significant difference by grade, with sophomores and seniors reporting more frequent involvement in sexual activity. These findings suggest that participation in a high performance sports activity is positively associated with some reduced sexual risk-taking behaviors for adolescent females.