The Affordable Care Act and the Transformation of US Health Care

The neoliberal period was accompanied by a momentous transformation within the US health care system.  As the result of a number of political and historical dynamics, the healthcare law signed by President Barack Obama in 2010 ‑the Affordable Care Act (ACA)‑ drew less on universal models from abroad than it did on earlier conservative healthcare reform proposals. This was in part the result of the influence of powerful corporate healthcare interests. While the ACA expands healthcare coverage, it does so incompletely and unevenly, with persistent uninsurance and disparities in access based on insurance status. Additionally, the law accommodates an overall shift towards a consumerist model of care characterized by high cost sharing at time of use. Finally, the law encourages the further consolidation of the healthcare sector, for instance into units named “Accountable Care Organizations” that closely resemble the health maintenance organizations favored by managed care advocates. The overall effect has been to maintain a fragmented system that is neither equitable nor efficient. A single payer universal system would, in contrast, help transform healthcare into a social right.

Cláusulas de apertura al derecho internacional de los Derechos Humanos: constituciones iberoamericanas

Las Constituciones iberoamericanas reflejan la preocupación de reconocer y garantizar a todos sus habitantes los derechos humanos fundamentales del ser humano, para lo cual integran dentro de su articulado cláusulas especiales donde reconocen la apertura a estos derechos. Para dicho reconocimiento cada Estado elige los principios y elementos que considera esenciales, y que dentro de esta reflexión se han denominado elementos básicos de las cláusulas de apertura. El análisis comparativo parte precisamente de estos puntos que mencionan casi todos los textos constitutivos de Iberoamérica.

Ensayo ganador del VII premio Enrique Ruano Casanova: La presencia del crucifijo en las aulas. Jurisprudencia nacional y europea

Cuando se aprueba la Constitución Española en 1978, España se convierte en un Estado aconfesional, reconociendo por primera vez un verdadero derecho de libertad religiosa de todos los individuos. Precisamente, el ejercicio de esta libertad en una situación de igualdad ha originado diversas polémicas desde que se instauró la democracia. Una de las controversias que más repercusión ha tenido en los últimos años viene determinada por la presencia de los crucifijos u otros símbolos en las aulas de algunos colegios públicos, cuestión que ha sido abordada por los tribunales españoles, así como por el Tribunal Europeo de Derechos Humanos.

Rethinking Care Through Social Reproduction: Articulating Circuits of Migration

Care has come to dominate much feminist research on globalized migrations and the transfer of labor from the South to the North, while the older concept of reproduction had been pushed into the background but is now becoming the subject of debates on the commodification of care in the household and changes in welfare state policies. This article argues that we could achieve a better understanding of the different modalities and trajectories of care in the reproduction of individuals, families, and communities, both of migrant and nonmigrant populations by articulating the diverse circuits of migration, in particular that of labor and the family. In doing this, I go back to the earlier North American writing on racialized minorities and migrants and stratified social reproduction. I also explore insights from current Asian studies of gendered circuits of migration connecting labor and marriage migrations as well as the notion of global householding that highlights the gender politics of social reproduction operating within and beyond households in institutional and welfare architectures. In contrast to Asia, there has relatively been little exploration in European studies of the articulation of labor and family migrations through the lens of social reproduction. However, connecting the different types of migration enables us to achieve a more complex understanding of care trajectories and their contribution to social reproduction.