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Full-Text Articles in Law

Regulating Secrecy, W. Nicholson Price Ii Dec 2016

Regulating Secrecy, W. Nicholson Price Ii

Articles

Inventors face a stark choice between two intellectual property systems of protecting innovative ideas: patents and trade secrecy. But accounts of this choice underexplore the role of the regulators that dominate some areas of innovation. Regulation interacts with intellectual property exclusivity in socially problematic ways by encouraging secrecy at the expense of innovation, efficiency, and competition. This Article theorizes how regulation empowers intellectual property generally, explains why this strengthening is problematic for trade secrecy but not for patents, and offers the solution of regulator-enforced disclosure. When a regulator defines a product or a process, it becomes much harder to successfully …


R-Egg-Ulation: A Call For Greater Regulation Of The Big Business Of Human Egg Harvesting, Danielle A. Vera Dec 2016

R-Egg-Ulation: A Call For Greater Regulation Of The Big Business Of Human Egg Harvesting, Danielle A. Vera

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

When it comes to young healthy women “donating” their eggs, America has a regulation problem. This Note explains the science behind the harvesting of human eggs, focusing on potential egg donors, and describes the specific factors that make egg donation a unique type of transaction. It describes the current regulatory status of the assisted reproductive technology industry in the United States and highlights the ways in which this scheme fails to protect egg “donors.” This Note concludes with a call for comprehensive regulation of the assisted reproductive technology industry.


The Tax Definition Of "Medical Care:" A Critique Of The Startling Irs Arguments In O'Donnabhain V. Commissioner, Katherine Pratt Dec 2016

The Tax Definition Of "Medical Care:" A Critique Of The Startling Irs Arguments In O'Donnabhain V. Commissioner, Katherine Pratt

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This Article critiques the startling arguments made by the Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) in O’Donnabhain v. Commissioner, a case in which the issue was whether a person diagnosed with gender identity disorder (“GID”) could take a federal tax deduction for the costs of male-to-female medical transition, including hormone treatment, genital surgery, and breast augmentation. Internal Revenue Code § 213 allows a deduction for the costs of “medical care,” which (1) includes costs incurred for “the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease, or for the purpose of affecting any structure or function of the body,” but (2) generally …


Trouble On The Exchanges — Does The United Owe Billions To Health Insurers?, Nicholas Bagley Nov 2016

Trouble On The Exchanges — Does The United Owe Billions To Health Insurers?, Nicholas Bagley

Articles

Yet another bruising fight has erupted over health care reform. On September 9, 2016, the Obama administration offered to open settlement negotiations with health insurers that have sued the United States to recover billions of dollars that they claim they are owed. Congressional Republicans are incensed, believing that any settlement would illegally squander taxpayer dollars in a lastgasp effort to save the Affordable Care Act (ACA).


Black Health Matters: Disparities, Community Health, And Interest Convergence, Mary Crossley Oct 2016

Black Health Matters: Disparities, Community Health, And Interest Convergence, Mary Crossley

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Health disparities represent a significant strand in the fabric of racial injustice in the United States, one that has proven exceptionally durable. Many millions of dollars have been invested in addressing racial disparities over the past three decades. Researchers have identified disparities, unpacked their causes, and tracked their trajectories, with only limited progress in narrowing the health gap between whites and racial and ethnic minorities. The implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and the movement toward value-based payment methods for health care may supply a new avenue for addressing disparities. This Article argues that the ACA’s requirement that tax-exempt …


Nfib V. Sebelius And The Individual Mandate: Thoughts On The Tax/Regulation Distinction, Kyle D. Logue Jun 2016

Nfib V. Sebelius And The Individual Mandate: Thoughts On The Tax/Regulation Distinction, Kyle D. Logue

Michigan Business & Entrepreneurial Law Review

When Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion of the Court in National Federation of Independent Businesses v. Sebelius (NFIB) explaining the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) minimum essential coverage provision (sometimes referred to as the individual mandate), he reasoned that the mandate—or, more precisely, the enforcement provision that accompanied the mandate (the Shared Responsibility Payment or SRP)—could be understood as a tax on the failure to purchase health insurance. According to this view, the enactment of the mandate and its accompanying enforcement provisions fell within Congress’s virtually unlimited power to “lay and collect taxes.” This tax-based interpretation …


Promoting Healthcare Innovation On The Demand Side, Rebecca S. Eisenberg, W. Nicholson Price Apr 2016

Promoting Healthcare Innovation On The Demand Side, Rebecca S. Eisenberg, W. Nicholson Price

Law & Economics Working Papers

Innovation policy often focuses on the incentives of firms that sell new products. But optimal use of healthcare products also requires good information about the likely effects of products in different patients, and it is hard to provide the right incentives for producers to develop and disclose information that could limit future sales. Regulation partially fills this gap by requiring sellers to conduct clinical trials and report adverse events. But it is inherently problematic to rely on producers to supply negative information about their own products. Healthcare payers, however, can profit from avoiding inappropriate use of costly technologies. Recent technological …


Big Data, Patents, And The Future Of Medicine, W. Nicholson Price Ii Apr 2016

Big Data, Patents, And The Future Of Medicine, W. Nicholson Price Ii

Articles

Big data has tremendous potential to improve health care. Unfortunately, intellectual property law isn’t ready to support that leap. In the next wave of data- driven medicine, black-box medicine, researchers use sophisticated algorithms to examine huge troves of health data, finding complex, implicit relationships and making individualized assessments for patients. Black-box medicine offers potentially immense benefits, but also requires substantial high investment. Firms must develop new datasets, models, and validations, which are all nonrivalrous information goods with significant spillovers, requiring incentives for welfare-optimizing investment. Current intellectual property law fails to provide adequate incentives for black- box medicine. The Supreme Court …


Productivity And Affinity In The Age Of Dignity, Stephen Lee Apr 2016

Productivity And Affinity In The Age Of Dignity, Stephen Lee

Michigan Law Review

This Review proceeds as follows. Part I summarizes The Age of Dignity. Part II explains how this segment of immigrant workers challenges the productivity/affinity binary that dominates immigration law’s formal migration rules. Part III shows how this binary sets up dual migration streams, both of which could account for future flows of care workers. As Part III shows, the example of the eldercare industry nicely illustrates how the employment based and family-based migration systems simply represent two different ways of filling labor needs. I then conclude.


A Liberal Dilemma: Respecting Autonomy While Also Protecting Inchoate Children From Prenatal Substance Abuse., Andrew J. Weisberg, Frank E. Vandervort Mar 2016

A Liberal Dilemma: Respecting Autonomy While Also Protecting Inchoate Children From Prenatal Substance Abuse., Andrew J. Weisberg, Frank E. Vandervort

Articles

Substance abuse is a significant social problem in America. It is estimated that some eighteen million Americans have an alcohol abuse problem and that almost five million have a drug abuse problem. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, substance abuse costs some $700 billion per year Substance abuse is a major contributor to child maltreatment. It is estimated that between one- and two-thirds of cases in which children enter foster care are linked to parental substance abuse. Unfortunately, this may be an underestimate as recent research suggests that many cases, particularly cases in which children have been exposed …


The Affordable Care Act, Experience Rating, And The Problem Of Non-Vaccination, Eric Esshaki Feb 2016

The Affordable Care Act, Experience Rating, And The Problem Of Non-Vaccination, Eric Esshaki

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform Caveat

Polio, the whooping cough, and the mumps, among many other communicable diseases, were once prevalent in communities within the developed world and killed millions of people.1 The advent of vaccinations contained or eradicated several of these diseases.2 However, these diseases still exist in the environment3 and are making a comeback in the United States.4 Their persistence is directly attributable to the rising trend among parents refusing to vaccinate their children.5 One proposed solution to this problem is to hold parents liable in tort when others are harmed by their failure to vaccinate. Another proposed solution argues that parents should pay …


Shared Responsibility Regulation Model For Cross-Border Reproductive Transactions, Sharon Bassan Jan 2016

Shared Responsibility Regulation Model For Cross-Border Reproductive Transactions, Sharon Bassan

Michigan Journal of International Law

The term “cross-border reproductive transactions” refers to the movement of tens of thousands of people, who travel from one country to purchase reproductive services from suppliers in other countries, in order to have a child.2 It is estimated that between eleven and fourteen thousand patients in Europe alone engage in this practice annually.3 Historically, the phrase ‘medical tourism’ used to refer to the travel of patients from less-affluent countries seeking better healthcare in countries with superior healthcare standards. Today, the journey is just as likely to flow in the opposite direction, as patients travel from industrialized to less affluent countries …


Privacy And Accountability In Black-Box Medicine, Roger Allan Ford, W. Nicholson Price Ii Jan 2016

Privacy And Accountability In Black-Box Medicine, Roger Allan Ford, W. Nicholson Price Ii

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

Black-box medicine—the use of big data and sophisticated machine-learning techniques for health-care applications—could be the future of personalized medicine. Black-box medicine promises to make it easier to diagnose rare diseases and conditions, identify the most promising treatments, and allocate scarce resources among different patients. But to succeed, it must overcome two separate, but related, problems: patient privacy and algorithmic accountability. Privacy is a problem because researchers need access to huge amounts of patient health information to generate useful medical predictions. And accountability is a problem because black-box algorithms must be verified by outsiders to ensure they are accurate and unbiased, …


Legal Limits And The Implementation Of The Affordable Care Act, Nicholas Bagley Jan 2016

Legal Limits And The Implementation Of The Affordable Care Act, Nicholas Bagley

Articles

Accusations of illegality have dogged the Obama Administration's efforts to implement the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the most ambitious piece of social legislation since the advent of Medicare and Medicaid. Some of the accusations have merit; indeed, it would be surprising if they did not. Even as the ACA's rollout has exposed unanticipated difficulties in the statutory design, congressional antipathy to health reform has precluded looking to the legislature to iron out those difficulties. To secure his principal achievement, President Obama has repeatedly tested the limits of executive authority in implementing the ACA. Six years after its enactment and two …