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Heterogeneity In Irb Policies With Regard To Disclosures About Payment For Participation In Recruitment Materials, Christopher Robertson, Megan Wright Oct 2014

Heterogeneity In Irb Policies With Regard To Disclosures About Payment For Participation In Recruitment Materials, Christopher Robertson, Megan Wright

Faculty Scholarship

Scholars have documented variation in the way local Institutional Review Boards differently adjudicate identical research proposals. It is unclear whether such heterogeneity is due to variation in positive policies, or variation in human processes of interpretation and enforcement. A particularly interesting question relates to whether investigators are allowed to provide truthful information about research opportunities to potential participants, which some IRBs seem to forbid. We investigated local IRB policies on disclosing the amount of compensation in recruitment materials by conducting a census of the top 100 institutions by receipt of NIH funding in 2012. We downloaded the relevant policies and …


A Randomized Experiment Of The Split Benefit Health Insurance Reform To Reduce High-Cost, Low-Value Consumption, Christopher Robertson, David V. Yokum, Nimish Sheth, Keith A. Joiner Sep 2014

A Randomized Experiment Of The Split Benefit Health Insurance Reform To Reduce High-Cost, Low-Value Consumption, Christopher Robertson, David V. Yokum, Nimish Sheth, Keith A. Joiner

Faculty Scholarship

Traditional cost sharing for health care is stymied by limited patient wealth. The “split benefit” is a new way to reduce consumption of high-cost, low-value treatments for which the risk/benefit ratio is uncertain. When a physician prescribes a costly unproven procedure, the insurer could pay a portion of the benefit directly to the patient, creating a decision opportunity for the patient. The insurer saves the remainder, unless the patient consumes. In this paper, a vignette-based randomized controlled experiment with 1,800 respondents sought to test the potential efficacy of the split benefit. The intervention reduced the odds of consumption by about …


Paternalism, Public Health, And Behavioral Economics: A Problematic Combination, Wendy K. Mariner Jul 2014

Paternalism, Public Health, And Behavioral Economics: A Problematic Combination, Wendy K. Mariner

Faculty Scholarship

Some critiques of public health regulations assume that measures directed at industry should be considered paternalistic whenever they limit any consumer choices. Given the presumption against paternalistic measures, this conception of paternalism puts government proposals to regulate industry to the same stringent proof as clearly paternalist proposals to directly regulate individuals for their own benefit. The result is to discourage regulating industry in ways that protect the public from harm and instead to encourage regulating individuals for their own good -- quite the opposite of what one would expect from a rejection of paternalism. Arguments favoring "soft paternalism" to justify …


Analytical Framework For Examining The Value Of Antibacterial Products, Kevin Outterson, Aylin Sertkaya, John T. Eyraud, Anna Birkenback, Calvin Franz, Nyssa Ackerley, Valerie Overton Apr 2014

Analytical Framework For Examining The Value Of Antibacterial Products, Kevin Outterson, Aylin Sertkaya, John T. Eyraud, Anna Birkenback, Calvin Franz, Nyssa Ackerley, Valerie Overton

Faculty Scholarship

Antibacterial resistance is a growing global problem. According to the most recent statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), at least 2 million people acquire serious infections with bacteria that are resistant to one or more of antibacterial drugs designed to treat those infections in the United States alone. Of these, approximately 23,000 die as a result of drug-resistant infections. Even though estimates vary widely, the economic cost of antibacterial resistance in the United States could be as high as $20 billion and $35 billion a year in excess direct healthcare costs and lost productivity costs, respectively …


The Drug Quality And Security Act - Mind The Gaps, Kevin Outterson Jan 2014

The Drug Quality And Security Act - Mind The Gaps, Kevin Outterson

Faculty Scholarship

After the compounding pharmacy disaster at New England Compounding Center, Congress had an opportunity to assure that all compounded medicines were safe and effective. The Drug Quality and Safety Act, despite its name, fell short of that mark.


Medicaid Expansion As Completion Of The Great Society, Nicole Huberfeld Jan 2014

Medicaid Expansion As Completion Of The Great Society, Nicole Huberfeld

Faculty Scholarship

A state’s decision whether to expand Medicaid has become a highly politicized issue, spawning countless news stories and on-going debate. However, this Essay takes a step back from that highly charged discourse and situates Medicaid expansion in its historical context. We reveal that this latest change universalizes the program, holding the power to finally realize President Johnson’s vision for the Great Society, almost fifty years later. Medicaid can be understood as a universal program for three reasons: (1) the percentage of thepopulation of children, pregnant women, and non-elderly adults it covers; (2) the degree to which Medicaid funds long-term care …


The Burden Of Deciding For Yourself: The Disutility Caused By Out-Of-Pocket Healthcare Spending, Christopher Robertson, David Yokum Jan 2014

The Burden Of Deciding For Yourself: The Disutility Caused By Out-Of-Pocket Healthcare Spending, Christopher Robertson, David Yokum

Faculty Scholarship

As part of a larger "consumer-directed healthcare movement," cost-sharing mechanisms, such as copays and deductibles, cause patients to pay out of pocket for a portion of the costs of the healthcare they consume. Cost sharing is intended to reduce costs by changing consumption behavior, and it has been shown to be an effective though incomplete solution to the problem of unsustainable cost growth. It is controversial nonetheless. This Essay distinguishes three different normative problems with cost sharing (including underinsurance, deterrence of high-value care, and a tax on sickness), which can all be fixed through more precision in the design of …


The Presumption Against Expensive Health Care Consumption, Christopher Robertson Jan 2014

The Presumption Against Expensive Health Care Consumption, Christopher Robertson

Faculty Scholarship

This essay, as part of a symposium in honor of Professor Einer Elhauge, starts with his recognition that, for both epistemic and normative reasons, it remains profoundly difficult to regulate particular uses of medical technologies on the basis of their cost-benefit ratios. Nonetheless, this essay argues in favor of a general regulatory presumption against consumption for the most expensive medical technology usages, which drive most of aggregate healthcare spending. This essay synthesizes twelve facts about the ways in which medical technologies are produced, regulated, studied, and consumed to suggest that it is quite unlikely that the most expensive usages of …


Money, Sex, And Religion – The Supreme Court's Aca Sequel, George J. Annas Jan 2014

Money, Sex, And Religion – The Supreme Court's Aca Sequel, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court decision in the Hobby Lobby case is in many ways a sequel to the Court's 2012 decision on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The majority decision, written by Justice Samuel Alito, is a setback for both the ACA's foundational goal of access to universal health care and for women's health care specifically. The Court's ruling can be viewed as a direct consequence of our fragmented health care system, in which fundamental duties are incrementally delegated and imposed on a range of public and private actors. Our incremental, fragmented, and incomplete health insurance system means …


Hiv, Violence Against Women, And Criminal Law Interventions, Aziza Ahmed Jan 2014

Hiv, Violence Against Women, And Criminal Law Interventions, Aziza Ahmed

Faculty Scholarship

The growing calls for the “securitization of body and property,”[ii] documented by Jonathan Simon in his book Governing Through Crime, illustrates a deep tension in our understanding of the role of criminal law as a tool for societal transformation.[iii] For some, including communities of color, the criminal legal system is a place where inequality flourishes;[iv] for others, including those feminists who have support criminal law interventions, it has become a tool to realize equality.[v] The Trafficking Victims Protection Act, reauthorized in 2013 as an amendment to the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA),[vi] relies heavily on the criminal law to obtain …


Health Insurance Is Dead; Long Live Health Insurance, Wendy K. Mariner Jan 2014

Health Insurance Is Dead; Long Live Health Insurance, Wendy K. Mariner

Faculty Scholarship

Today, health insurance is no longer simply a class of insurance that covers risks to health, and it has not been so for many years. Health insurance has become a unique form of insurance — a mechanism to pay for healthcare that uses risk spreading as one of several pricing methods. The Affordable Care Act builds on this important payment function to create a complex social insurance system to finance healthcare for (almost) everyone. This article examines how the ACA draws on various conceptions of insurance to produce a quasi-social insurance system. This system poses new challenges to laws governing …


Allocating Responsibility For Health Care Decisions Under The United States Affordable Care Act, Wendy K. Mariner Jan 2014

Allocating Responsibility For Health Care Decisions Under The United States Affordable Care Act, Wendy K. Mariner

Faculty Scholarship

This article summarizes the major elements of the ACA's insurance reforms and how they affect responsibility for making decisions about the health care that people receive. A key example of the difficulty of allocating decision making responsibility is the effort to define a minimum benefit package for insurance plans, called essential health benefits. While the ACA should achieve its goal of near-universal access to care, it leaves in place a multiplicity of processes and decision-makers for determining individual treatment. As a result, decisions about what care is provided are likely to remain, much as they are today, divided among government …