Professor Ira Ellman recently was published in The New York Times Sunday Dialogue section for a letter

Ira Ellman

he wrote with Stephen Sugarman, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

The letter, published on Nov. 19, focused on the health care reform law pushed by President Obama and the potential ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court on the mandate’s constitutionality.

Ellman said in his letter that the mandate is constitutional, merely changing how people will buy healthcare.

“The rational way to pay for health care is to carry insurance, as most Americans do,” the letter said. “Those who don’t freeload in various ways such as going to emergency rooms, pushing the costs on taxpayers and those with insurance. The new law just changes how we buy care to make the system fairer, more rational and more cost-effective.”

The letter can be read here.

Ellman’s current scholarly projects include an empirical investigation into how people make judgments about appropriate legal rules, and he has recently been awarded a large grant from an English foundation to extend that work to the United Kingdom. He is an affiliate faculty member of the Center for Child and Youth Policy the University of California at Berkeley.