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The Psychology Of Science Denialism And Lessons For Public Health Authorities, Brenna Moreno, Molly J. Walker Wilson Jan 2023

The Psychology Of Science Denialism And Lessons For Public Health Authorities, Brenna Moreno, Molly J. Walker Wilson

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As it wreaked tragedy on the world, the outbreak of COVID-19 helped expose a pandemic of a different kind, one steeped in distrust and contrarianism. This movement, termed science denialism, has been lurking and undermining public health efforts for decades. Specifically, it is “the employment of rhetorical arguments to give the appearance of legitimate debate where there is none, an approach that has the ultimate goal of rejecting a proposition on which a scientific consensus exists.” Unlike skepticism, which is “doubt as to the truth of something” and works to progress both science and society, denialism is characterized by individuals’ …


Covid-19 And The Conundrum Of Mask Requirements, Robert Gatter, Seema Mohapatra Jan 2020

Covid-19 And The Conundrum Of Mask Requirements, Robert Gatter, Seema Mohapatra

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As states begin to loosen their COVID-19 restrictions, public debate is underway about what public health measures are appropriate. Many states have some form of mask-wearing orders to prevent the spread of COVID-19 infection. Public health guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization has conflicted. From a public health point of view, it is not clear what the right answer is. In the absence of directives, individuals are also making their own choices about mask use. At a time when public health measures, like shelter-in-place orders and social distancing, are being used to …


Medicaid's Vital Role In Addressing Health And Economic Emergencies, Nicole Huberfeld, Sidney Watson Jan 2020

Medicaid's Vital Role In Addressing Health And Economic Emergencies, Nicole Huberfeld, Sidney Watson

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Medicaid plays an essential role in helping states respond to crises. Medicaid guarantees federal matching funds to states, which helps with unanticipated costs associated with public health emergencies, like COVID-19, and increases in enrollment that inevitably occur during times of economic downturn. Medicaid’s joint federal/state structure, called cooperative federalism, gives states significant flexibility within federal rules that allows states to streamline eligibility and expand benefits, which is especially important during emergencies. Federal emergency declarations give the secretary of Health and Human Services temporary authority to exercise regulatory flexibility to ensure that sufficient health care is available to meet the needs …


Regulating E-Cigarettes: Why Policies Diverge, Eric A. Feldman Apr 2019

Regulating E-Cigarettes: Why Policies Diverge, Eric A. Feldman

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This paper, part of a festschrift in honor of Professor Malcolm Feeley, explores the landscape of e-cigarette policy globally by looking at three jurisdictions that have taken starkly different approaches to regulating e-cigarettes—the US, Japan, and China. Each of those countries has a robust tobacco industry, government agencies entrusted with protecting public health, an active and sophisticated scientific and medical community, and a regulatory structure for managing new pharmaceutical, tobacco, and consumer products. All three are signatories of the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, all are signatories of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, …


The Developmental Effect Of State Alcohol Prohibitions At The Turn Of The 20th Century, Mary F. Evans, Eric Helland, Jonathan Klick, Ashwin Patel Sep 2015

The Developmental Effect Of State Alcohol Prohibitions At The Turn Of The 20th Century, Mary F. Evans, Eric Helland, Jonathan Klick, Ashwin Patel

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We examine the quasi-randomization of alcohol consumption created by state-level alcohol prohibition laws passed in the U.S. in the early part of the 20th century. Using a large dataset of World War II enlistees, we exploit the differential timing of these laws to examine their effects on adult educational attainment, obesity, and height. We find statistically significant effects for education and obesity that do not appear to be the result of pre-existing trends. Our findings add to the growing body of economic studies that examines the long-run impacts of in utero and childhood environmental conditions.


Public Assistance, Drug Testing, And The Law: The Limits Of Population-Based Legal Analysis, Candice T. Player Jan 2014

Public Assistance, Drug Testing, And The Law: The Limits Of Population-Based Legal Analysis, Candice T. Player

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In Populations, Public Health and the Law, legal scholar Wendy Parmet urges courts to embrace population-based legal analysis, a public health inspired approach to legal reasoning. Parmet contends that population-based legal analysis offers a way to analyze legal issues—not unlike law and economics—as well as a set of values from which to critique contemporary legal discourse. Population-based analysis has been warmly embraced by the health law community as a bold new way of analyzing legal issues. Still, population-based analysis is not without its problems. At times, Parmet claims too much territory for the population perspective. Moreover, Parmet urges courts …


Shots For Tots?, Eric A. Feldman May 2013

Shots For Tots?, Eric A. Feldman

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By endorsing the use of a vaccine that makes the experience of puffing on a cigarette deeply distasteful, Lieber and Millum have taken the first few tentative steps into a future filled with medical interventions that manipulate individual preferences. It is tempting to embrace the careful arguments of “Preventing Sin” and celebrate the possibility that the profound individual and social costs of smoking will finally be tamed. Yet there is something unsettling about the possibility that parental discretion may be on the cusp of a radical expansion, one that involves a new and unexplored approach to behavior modification.


Debating The Cause Of Health Disparities: Implications For Bioethics And Racial Equality, Dorothy E. Roberts Jan 2012

Debating The Cause Of Health Disparities: Implications For Bioethics And Racial Equality, Dorothy E. Roberts

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No abstract provided.


The Triumph And Tragedy Of Tobacco Control: A Tale Of Nine Nations, Eric A. Feldman, Ronald Bayer Dec 2011

The Triumph And Tragedy Of Tobacco Control: A Tale Of Nine Nations, Eric A. Feldman, Ronald Bayer

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The use of law and policy to limit tobacco consumption illustrates one of the greatest triumphs of public health in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as well as one of its most fundamental failures. Overall decreases in tobacco consumption throughout the developed world represent millions of saved lives and unquantifiable suffering averted. Yet those benefits have not been equally distributed. The poor and the undereducated have enjoyed fewer of the gains. In this review, we build on existing tobacco control scholarship and expand it both conceptually and comparatively. Our focus is the social gradient of smoking both within …


Health Insurance, Risk, And Responsibility After The Patient Protection And Affordable Care Act, Tom Baker Feb 2011

Health Insurance, Risk, And Responsibility After The Patient Protection And Affordable Care Act, Tom Baker

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This essay explores the new social contract of healthcare solidarity through private ownership, markets, choice, and individual responsibility embodied in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. This essay first explains the four main health care risk distribution institutions affected by the Act – Medicare, Medicaid, the individual and small employer market, and the large group market – with an emphasis on how the Act changes those institutions and how they are financed. The essay then describes the “fair share” approach to health care financing embodied in the Act. This approach largely rejects the actuarial fairness vision of what constitutes …


Tontines For The Invincibles: Enticing Low Risks Into The Health-Insurance Pool With An Idea From Insurance History And Behavioral Economics, Tom Baker, Peter Siegelman Jan 2010

Tontines For The Invincibles: Enticing Low Risks Into The Health-Insurance Pool With An Idea From Insurance History And Behavioral Economics, Tom Baker, Peter Siegelman

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Over one third of the uninsured adults in the U.S. below retirement age are between 19 and 29 years old. Young adults, especially men, often go without insurance, even when buying it is mandatory and sometimes even when it is a low cost employment benefit. This paper proposes a new form of health insurance targeted at this group—the “Young Invincibles”—those who (wrongly) believe that they don’t need health insurance because they won’t get sick. Our proposal offers a cash bonus to those who turn out to be right in their belief that they did not really need health insurance. The …


Contingent Valuation Studies And Health Policy, Matthew D. Adler Jan 2010

Contingent Valuation Studies And Health Policy, Matthew D. Adler

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This short comment argues that both cost-benefit analysis (CBA) and cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) should be seen as imperfect tools for evaluating health policy. This is true, not only for extra-welfarists, but even for welfarists, since both CBA and CEA can deviate from the use of social welfare functions (SWF). A simple model is provided to illustrate the divergence between CBA, CEA, and the SWF approach. With this insight in mind, the comment considers the appropriate role of contingent-valuation studies. For full text, please see: http://www.law.upenn.edu/cf/faculty/madler/workingpapers/578A59B6d01.pdf.


Consumer Protection In An Era Of Globalization, Cary Coglianese, Adam M. Finkel, David T. Zaring Jan 2009

Consumer Protection In An Era Of Globalization, Cary Coglianese, Adam M. Finkel, David T. Zaring

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With expanding global trade, the challenge of protecting consumers from unsafe food, pharmaceuticals, and consumer products has grown increasingly salient, necessitating the development of new policy ideas and analysis. This chapter introduces the book, Import Safety: Regulatory Governance in the Global Economy, a multidisciplinary project analyzing import safety problems and an array of innovative solutions to these problems. The challenge of protecting the public from unsafe imports arises from the sheer volume of global trade as well as the complexity of products being traded and the vast number of inputs each product contains. It is further compounded by the …


Abortion Access And Risky Sex Among Teens: Parental Involvement Laws And Sexually Transmitted Diseases, Jonathan Klick, Thomas Stratmann Jan 2007

Abortion Access And Risky Sex Among Teens: Parental Involvement Laws And Sexually Transmitted Diseases, Jonathan Klick, Thomas Stratmann

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Laws requiring minors to seek parental consent or to notify a parent prior to obtaining an abortion raise the cost of risky sex for teenagers. Assuming choices to engage in risky sex are made rationally, parental involvement laws should lead to less risky sex among teens, either because of a reduction of sexual activity altogether or because teens will be more fastidious in the use of birth control ex ante. Using gonorrhea rates among older women to control for unobserved heterogeneity across states, our results indicate that the enactment of parental involvement laws significantly reduces risky sexual activity among teenage …


Is Equal Access The Prescription For Equity?, Victor Sidel, Dorothy E. Roberts, Jennifer Dohrn, Kathy Anastos, Nitza Milagros Escalera, Peter Holland, Sylvia Kleinman, Sylvia Law, Jack O'Sullivan, Robert Padgug, Dennis Rivera, Beth Weitzman Jan 1995

Is Equal Access The Prescription For Equity?, Victor Sidel, Dorothy E. Roberts, Jennifer Dohrn, Kathy Anastos, Nitza Milagros Escalera, Peter Holland, Sylvia Kleinman, Sylvia Law, Jack O'Sullivan, Robert Padgug, Dennis Rivera, Beth Weitzman

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.