Law Commons^™

National And Global Health Law: A Scholarly Examination Of The Most Pressing Health Hazards, Lawrence O. Gostin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The health of individuals, families, and communities has deep, intuitive meaning. So much of what we aspire to be as individuals or as members of society relies on health. Our shared intuitions about the value of health manifest themselves in public and political concerns. The media widely reports threats to the public's health, such as a traveler with multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, E-coli from contaminated spinach, miners' deaths, unsafe children's toys, and dangerous pharmaceuticals. Election years predictably spur new, or refashioned, proposals for health care reform. And there remain enduring, intractable health hazards, such as tobacco, obesity, motor vehicle crashes, and …

Risk Governance And Deliberative Democracy In Health Care, Nan D. Hunter

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

I argue in this article that the concept of risk-centered governance is the best theoretical paradigm for understanding health law and the health care system. Over the past 20 years, an insurance-inflected discourse has migrated from the purely financial side of the health system into the heart of traditional medicine - the doctor-patient relationship. Rather than focus on doctrinal strands, I argue that scholars should analyze the law of health care as a set of governance practices organized around managing and allocating financial, as well as clinical, risk.

Over the same period, the body of law that structures most private …

Socioeconomic Disparities In Health: A Symposium On The Relationships Between Poverty And Health, Lawrence O. Gostin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The disparities in health between the rich and poor are so striking, and the results so dire, that reducing the gap is an ethical imperative.

A strong and consistent finding of epidemiological research is that socioeconomic status (SES) is correlated with morbidity, mortality, and functioning. SES is a complex combination of income, education, and occupation. Theorists posit that material disadvantage, diminished control over life's circumstances, and lack of social acceptance all contribute to poor health outcomes. The relationship between SES and health often is referred to as a "gradient" because of the graded and continuous nature of the association; health …