The Affordable Care Act in Court : Litigation Continues Unabated.

The Affordable Care Act has been a lightning rod for litigation, generating hundreds of cases seeking to have all or parts of the law declared illegal. This article focuses on Supreme Court cases that have assessed the ACA over the past decade and highlights those on the Court's pending docket.

Protecting Rights of Children With Medical Complexity in an Era of Spending Reduction.

Children with medical complexity (CMC) often require multiple services across the continuum of care, such as therapies and home nursing. However, sufficient access to needed services is not assured and varies considerably by payer, many of whom who face pressures to control health spending. In this article, we review the rights of CMC in Medicaid, the Children's Health Insurance Program, and various forms of private health insurance to receive services that are necessary to promote optimal health, development, and family functioning. Controlling laws such as the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Early and Periodic Screening, Diagnostic, and Treatment provisions of the Medicaid Act are discussed, and precedential court decisions affecting CMC are reviewed. Implications for policy, advocacy, and payment model design are explored in the context of current emphasis on spending reduction.

EPSDT's Role in Improving Child Vision, Hearing, and Oral Health.

The Medicaid Early and Periodic Screening, Diagnostic and Treatment (EPSDT) benefit offers health care coverage specifically targeted to meet the needs to low-income children and children with disabilities. This article provides a brief overview of EPSDT and then discusses how states are working to bring vision, hearing, and oral health services to children through EPSDT.

Civil Rights Laws as Tools to Advance Health in the Twenty-First Century.

To improve health in the twenty-first century, to promote both access to and quality of health care services and delivery, and to address significant health disparities, legal and policy approaches, specifically those focused on civil rights, could be used more intentionally and strategically. This review describes how civil rights laws, and their implementation and enforcement, help to encourage health in the United States, and it provides examples for peers around the world. The review uses a broad lens to define health for both classes of individuals and their communities--places where people live, learn, work, and play. Suggestions are offered for improving health and equity broadly, especially within societal groups and marginalized populations. These recommendations include multisectorial approaches that focus on the social determinants of health.

Implications of the Supreme Court's ACA Medicaid decision.

In the typical case, states are expected to act like independent sovereigns and reject federal funding conditions they do not like. In National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (NFIB), however, the Supreme Court found that Congress unduly coerced states when it enacted the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion provision. This article provides an overview to NFIB and discusses its implications. Focusing on Chief Justice Roberts' plurality opinion, the article explains that undue coercion may occur when the following four elements come together: (1) Congress enacts a new spending program; (2) Congress seeks to induce state participation in the new program by threatening to terminate all federal funding to an existing program; (3) the federal funding to the existing program is significant; and (4) the requirements of the new program are not related to the old program and, thus, could not have been anticipated by the state.

Adaptive beamforming for nonstationary arrays.

Adaptive beamformers automatically adjust to the input data on the sensors in an attempt to maximize the bearing resolution of a signal and minimize the effects of noise or interfering signals. To the author's knowledge, all adaptive beamformers currently available in the literature assume that the sensors are stationary over the time required to collect the data. This assumption is invalid on arrays of sensors mounted on nonstationary platforms, and results in poor beamforming performance. In this paper we present an adaptive beamformer that has been designed to operate on nonstationary arrays. The beamformer directly incorporates any changes in array shape or heading that may occur during the time required to collect the data. The output of the adaptive beamformer is shown for both synthetic data and for real data collected on a towed array. Results show that signal detection, bearing accuracy, bearing resolution, and interference suppression all increase when the array shape and track are incorporated into the beamformer if the sensor platform is not stationary.