Health Law Commons^™

Advancing The Right To Health Through Global Organizations: The Potential Role Of A Framework Convention On Global Health, Eric A. Friedman, Lawrence O. Gostin, Kent Buse

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Organizations, partnerships, and alliances form the building blocks of global governance. Global health organizations thus have the potential to play a formative role in determining the extent to which people are able to realize their right to health.

This article examines how major global health organizations, such as WHO, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, UNAIDS, and GAVI approach human rights concerns, including equality, accountability, and inclusive participation. We argue that organizational support for the right to health must transition from ad hoc and partial to permanent and comprehensive.

Drawing on the literature and our knowledge of ...

If A Right To Health Care Is Argued In The Supreme Court, Does Anybody Hear It?, W. David Koeninger

Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality

No abstract provided.

When Congress Practices Medicine: How Congressional Legislation Of Medical Judgment May Infringe A Fundamental Right, Shannon L. Pedersen

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Effect Of Any Willing Provider And Freedom Of Choice Laws On Health Care Expenditures, Jonathan Klick, Joshua D. Wright

Faculty Scholarship

Any Willing Provider and Freedom of Choice laws restrict the ability of managed care entities, including pharmacy benefit managers, to selectively contract with providers. The managed care entities argue this limits their ability to generate cost savings, while proponents of the laws suggest that such selective contracts limit competition, leading to an increase in aggregate costs. We examine the effect of state adoption of such laws on total state healthcare spending, finding that any willing provider/freedom of choice laws are associated with cost increases of at least 3 percent. These results suggest that these laws are harmful from a ...

Towards A Framework Convention On Global Health: A Transformative Agenda For Global Health Justice, Lawrence O. Gostin, Eric A. Friedman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

International law has responded weakly to the inequities in health care, public health, and the broader determinates of health that collectively cause the greatest loss of lives and human potential every year. Approximately one-third of global deaths can be attributed to enduring and unconscionable inequities. Despite significant progress in improving global health over the past several decades, these inequities persist. Current global governance for health is inadequate to the task of resolving these inequities, from lack of accountability and enforcement to inadequate funding and the absence of leadership required to respond to the threats to health that arise from other ...

Migrant Farmworkers And Access To Health Care In Minnesota: Needs, Barriers, And Remedies, Rachel L. Gunsalus

Honors Projects

Every year, migrant farmworkers (MFWs) travel from southern Texas to Minnesota to provide the temporary labor needed to harvest seasonal Minnesotan crops. Migratory agricultural labor exposes workers to increased risk of occupational hazards, communicable disease, and chronic illness. However, the agricultural industry does not offer employer-based health insurance to these seasonal workers, and provides wages insufficient to otherwise cover the cost of health care services. This research investigates the financial and non-financial barriers to health care for Minnesota’s MFWs through interviews with staff from Migrant Health Service, Inc., the only federally-designated Migrant Health Center (MHC) in Minnesota. The findings ...

Innovation Incentives Or Corrupt Conflicts Of Interest? Moving Beyond Jekyll And Hyde In Regulating Biomedical Academic-Industry Relationships, Patrick L. Taylor

Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law, and Ethics

The most contentious, unresolved issue in biomedicine in the last twenty-five years has been how to best address compensated partnerships between academic researchers and the pharmaceutical industry. Law and policy deliberately promote these partnerships through intellectual property law, research funding programs, and drug and device approval pathways while simultaneously condemning them through conflict-of-interest (COI) regulations. These regulations have not been subjected to the close scrutiny that is typically utilized in administrative law to evaluate and improve regulatory systems. This Article suggests that the solution to this standoff in biomedical law and policy lies in an informed, empirical approach. Such an ...

Are Independent Pharmacies In Need Of Special Care? An Argument Against An Antitrust Exemption For Collective Negotiations Of Pharmacists, Danielle B. Rosenthal

Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law, and Ethics

The last half-century has witnessed a dramatic rise in both health care spending and associated efforts to rein in costs. As these factors and others coalesced, the “managed care revolution” was born. In the last several decades, health maintenance organizations (HMOs) — along with other managed care organizations (MCOs), such as preferred provider organizations (PPOs), point of service (POS) plans, and managed indemnity plans — have attempted to balance patients’ quality of care against steadily rising health care costs. Although insurers greatly have improved access to care, they have faced sharp criticism from health care providers. Physicians and pharmacists, in particular, have ...

The Origins Of American Health Libertarianism, Lewis A. Grossman

Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law, and Ethics

This Article examines Americans’ enduring demand for freedom of therapeutic choice as a popular constitutional movement originating in the United States’ early years. In exploring extrajudicial advocacy for therapeutic choice between the American Revolution and the Civil War, this piece illustrates how multiple concepts of freedom in addition to bodily freedom bolstered the concept of a constitutional right to medical liberty. There is a deep current of belief in the United States that people have a right to choose their preferred treatments without government interference. Modern American history has given rise to movements for access to abortion, life-ending drugs, unapproved ...

Towards A Framework Convention On Global Health: A Transformative Agenda For Global Health Justice, Lawrence O. Gostin, Eric A. Friedman

Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law, and Ethics

Global health inequities cause nearly 20 million deaths annually, mostly among the world’s poor. Yet international law currently does little to reduce the massive inequalities that underlie these deaths. This Article offers the first systematic account of the goals and justifications, normative foundations, and potential construction of a proposed new global health treaty, a Framework Convention on Global Health (FCGH), grounded in the human right to health. Already endorsed by the United Nations Secretary-General, the FCGH would reimagine global governance for health, offering a new, post-Millennium Development Goals vision. A global coalition of civil society and academics has formed ...

Better Health, But Less Justice: Widening Health Disparities After National Federation Of Independent Business V. Sebelius, Emily W. Parento, Lawrence O. Gostin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

At the time it was enacted in 2010, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) was widely applauded by health activists, as it meant that the United States would at last join the overwhelming majority of industrialized countries in providing its population with guaranteed access to affordable health care. Roughly half of the increase in access to health insurance was to come from the expansion of Medicaid eligibility to all U.S. citizens and legal residents with income below 138% of the Federal Poverty Level. However, the Supreme Court’s 2012 ruling in National Federation of Independent Business v ...

Mid-Atlantic Ethics Committee Newsletter, Spring 2013

Mid-Atlantic Ethics Committee Newsletter

No abstract provided.

International Organ Trafficking Crisis: Solutions Addressing The Heart Of The Matter, Emily Kelly

Boston College Law Review

The grave inadequacy of current international attempts to curtail organ trafficking signals the need for a new approach in the form of a fundamental paradigm shift. Instead of continuing to focus efforts solely on criminalization, countries must devise a broad scheme aimed at decreasing organ shortages. These shortages fuel the illegal organ market, as people desperate for life-saving transplants travel internationally to purchase organs. Until the demand for this underground market subsides, traffickers will continue to exploit inconsistent legal loopholes in different countries by hopping across borders. To effectively address this problem, the international community must craft a new binding ...

A Long Way From Home: Restrictions On Federal Funding Of Abortions For Peace Corps Volunteers, Eliza T. Murray

Boston College Journal of Law & Social Justice

Since 1979, Congress has prohibited the Peace Corps from funding Volunteer abortions even in cases of rape, incest, or endangerment of the Volunteer’s life. This approach directly contrasts with domestic abortion policies, such as Medicaid and those in federal prisons, which contain funding exceptions in these dire circumstances. Affording female Peace Corps Volunteers the same rights enjoyed by other federal employees who receive health care from the government should be uncontroversial. Domestic appropriations politics, however, cloud the focus of this policy, which should be Volunteer health and safety, and thwart efforts for legislative change. Meanwhile, Female Volunteers risk their ...

A Toxic Mouthful: The Misalignment Of Dental Mercury Regulations, Kaitlin Mcgrath

Boston College Journal of Law & Social Justice

Mercury amalgam dental fillings have been used for over one hundred and fifty years in hundreds of millions of patients around the world. In the past two decades, scientific evidence has shown that mercury fillings have harmful effects on human health. Still, the American Dental Association maintains the position that mercury fillings are safe and should continue to be used without warning requirements. Although the Occupational Safety and Health Administration promulgated regulations to protect dentists and other dental workers from mercury exposure, the Food and Drug Administration has yet to provide similar protections to dental patients. Additionally, because Medicaid does ...

The Likely Impact Of National Federation On Commerce Clause Jurisprudence, Robert J. Pushaw Jr., Grant S. Nelson

Pepperdine Law Review

In National Federation of Independent Businesses v. Sebelius, the Supreme Court exhaustively analyzed Congress’s constitutional power to enact the watershed Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA or “Obamacare”). The ACA imposes a “shared responsibility requirement,” popularly known as the “Individual Mandate” (IM), which forces Americans to buy medical insurance or pay a “penalty.” The ACA’s text and legislative history, as well as the public defenses of it by President Obama and his supporters, consistently described the IM as a valid exercise of Congress’s power “[t]o regulate Commerce . . . among the several States.” This reliance on the ...

Using Clinical Practice Guidelines And Knowledge Translation Theory To Cure The Negative Impact Of The National Hospital Peer Review Hearing System On Healthcare Quality, Cost, And Access, Katharine Van Tassel

Pepperdine Law Review

According to an estimate by the Institute of Medicine made over a decade ago, treatment errors in hospitals alone caused 98,000 deaths yearly. This Institute of Medicine report is proving to be conservative. A recent Consumer Reports investigation came to the conclusion that “[m]ore than 2.25 million Americans will probably die from medical harm this decade…. That’s like wiping out the entire populations of North Dakota, Rhode Island, and Vermont. It’s a manmade disaster.” Thus, it appears that the three major systems in the United States that are designed to improve the quality of patient ...

Making Contraception Easier To Swallow: Background And Religious Challenges To The Hhs Rule Mandating Coverage Of Contraceptives, Chad Brooker

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class

No abstract provided.

Legal And Policy Standards For Addressing Workplace Racism: Employer Liability And Shared Responsibility For Race-Based Traumatic Stress, Robert T. Carter, Thomas D. Scheuermann

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class

No abstract provided.

Newsletter Spring/Summer 2013

Newsletter

No abstract provided.