Law Commons^™

Technical Standards For Admission To Medical Schools: Deaf Candidates Don't Get No Respect, Michael A. Schwartz

Michael A Schwartz

Medical schools utilize a set of technical standards used to screen applicants with disabilities, and one of the standards, which deals with communication, requires the applicant to be capable of speech and hearing. To the extent that medical schools exclude an applicant with a hearing impairment on the ground that the applicant cannot hear and speak, such exclusion would be (and should be) a violation of federal law. Schools must engage in an individualized assessment of how a Deaf medical candidate would satisfy the communication standard. The notion of an “undifferentiated graduate,” where all graduates qualify for practice in any …

Antibiotics In Food Animals: The Convergence Of Animal And Public Health, Science, Policy, Politics And The Law, Nancy Halpern

Nancy E Halpern D.V.M.

ANTIBIOTICS IN FOOD ANIMALS: THE CONVERGENCE OF ANIMAL AND PUBLIC HEALTH, SCIENCE, POLICY, POLITICS AND THE LAW

BY NANCY E HALPERN, DVM

MAY 3, 2009

ABSTRACT

The use of antibiotics in food animals, to prevent and/or control disease in these animals, has been a subject of discussion between the medical and veterinary and animal agricultural sectors and related national and international government entities for decades, because of concerns about the resulting increase in antibiotic resistance such practices facilitate. The underlying premise is that use of antibiotics in food animals leads to resistance of the bacteria consumed by humans, and reducing …

The End Of The Red Queen's Race: Medical Marijuana In The New Century, Ruth C. Stern, J. Herbie Difonzo

J. Herbie DiFonzo

The road to marijuana prohibition is paved with prejudice, hysteria, and the outright rejection of science and rationality. Despite its proven medical value, marijuana remains misclassified under federal law, misrepresented and misunderstood by most of our drug policy makers. Seizing their role as innovators in our federalist system, California and twelve other states have declared their support for the many doctors and patients who believe in the therapeutic benefits of cannabis. The conflict between the federal government and the states on medical marijuana is a study in “cultural federalism,” the experience of citizenship in a divided polity. Whether the medical …

Allison Engine, The False Claims Act, And Healthcare Fraud, Scott R. Ebner

Scott R. Ebner

The article focuses on possible amendments to the False Claims Act, the primary law used to prosecute fraud against the government. The amendments would expand the scope of fraudulent action encompassed by the Act. Although it may seem beneficial to allow the government more power to prosecute fraud, my position is that the costs imposed by the Act would be much greater than any benefit derived.

Over the past few decades, the Federal Courts have handed down decisions limiting the scope of the False Claims Act. Such decisions were made largely for policy reasons—for instance, when a subcontractor submits a …

The Health Care Reforms Of The 1990s: Failure Or Ultimate Triumph?, Robert F. Rich

Robert F Rich

The 1990s were one of the most active and engaging health care reform periods of United States history. More than 100 health care reform proposals were introduced in the period between 1991 and 1994. In this paper, we argue that to characterize this health care reform era as a "failure" is inaccurate and misleading. Not only have many of the reform proposals of tha era been incrementally enacted, but the structure, financing, and organization of the American health care system of the mid-2000s is radically different from the mid-1990s. This type of change in a relatively short period of time …

Will Americans Embrace Single-Payer Health Insurance: The Intractable Barriers Of Inertia, Free Market, And Culture, Susan A. Channick

Susan Channick

This article posits that the adoption of single-payer health insurance is effectively impossible in the United States. In spite of evidence that a single-payer system might be substantially more efficient and inexpensive than the complex, administratively-burdened multi-payer system we currently have, the probability that it will be part of health care reform is remote at best. The article identifies a number of reasons that a single-payer health insurance system cannot succeed ranging from inertia, path dependence, the expense of Medicare, the American belief in looking to the private sector for solutions to even large social problems, the fear of big …

Law In The Healthcare Crisis, John W. Hill

John W Hill Sr

The U.S. faces a healthcare crisis of monumental proportions with myriad facets including issues of access, quality, and affordability. Medical malpractice liability in this crisis is often alleged to play a role in this crisis through its impact on physician compensation and shortages. This study goes beyond the rhetorical arguments in exposing the root causes of the crisis to be the structure of healthcare delivery and physician compensation systems, in part using pooled data we develop. These systems greatly increase the cost of healthcare, lead to far too many medical errors, and skew the distribution of physicians across specialties, in …

Will Americans Embrace Single-Payer Health Insurance: The Intractable Barriers Of Inertia, Free Market, And Culture, Susan Adler Channick

Susan Channick

This article posits that the adoption of single-payer health insurance is effectively impossible in the United States. In spite of evidence that a single-payer system might be substantially more efficient and inexpensive than the complex, administratively-burdened multi-payer system we currently have, the probability that it can be part of health care reform is remote at best. The article identifies a number of reasons that a single-payer health insurance system cannot succeed ranging from inertia, path dependence, the expense of Medicare, the American belief in looking to the private sector for solutions to even large societal problems, the fear of big …

Law In The Healthcare Crisis, John W. Hill

John W Hill Sr

The U.S. faces a healthcare crisis of monumental proportions with myriad facets including issues of access, quality, and affordability. Medical malpractice liability in this crisis is often alleged to play a role in this crisis through its impact on physician compensation and shortages. This study goes beyond the rhetorical arguments in exposing the root causes of the crisis to be the structure of healthcare delivery and physician compensation systems, in part using pooled data we develop. These systems greatly increase the cost of healthcare, lead to far too many medical errors, and skew the distribution of physicians across specialties, in …

Law And The Healthcare Crisis, John W. Hill

John W Hill Sr

The U.S. faces a healthcare crisis of monumental proportions with myriad facets including issues of access, quality, and affordability. Medical malpractice liability in this crisis is often alleged to play a role in this crisis through its impact on physician compensation and shortages. This study goes beyond the rhetorical arguments in exposing the root causes of the crisis to be the structure of healthcare delivery and physician compensation systems, in part using pooled data we develop. These systems greatly increase the cost of healthcare, lead to far too many medical errors, and skew the distribution of physicians across specialties, in …

Shaping Parental Authority Over Children's Bodies, Alicia Ouellette

Alicia Ouellette

U.S. law treats parental decisions to size, shape, sculpt, and mine children’s bodies through the use of non-therapeutic medical and surgical interventions like decisions to send a child to a particular church or school. They are a matter of parental choice except in extraordinary cases involving grievous harm. This Article questions the assumption of parental rights that frames the current paradigm for medical decisionmaking for children. Focusing on cases involving eye surgery, human growth hormone, liposuction, and growth stunting, I argue that by allowing parents to subordinate their children’s interests to their own, the current paradigm distorts the parent-child relationship …

Will Americans Embrace Single-Payer Health Insurance: The Intractable Barriers Of Inertia, Free Market, And Culture, Susan Channick

Susan Channick

This article posits that the adoption of single-payer health insurance is effectively impossible in the United States. In spite of evidence that a single-payer system might be substantially more efficient and inexpensive than the complex, administratively-burdened multi-payer system we currently have, the probability that it can be part of health care reform is remote at best. The article identifies a number of reasons that a single-payer health insurance system cannot succeed ranging from inertia, path dependence, the expense of Medicare, the American belief in looking to the private sector for solutions to even social problems, the fear of big government …

Shaping Parental Authority Over Children's Bodies, Alicia Ouellette

Alicia Ouellette

U.S. law treats parental decisions to size, shape, sculpt, and mine children’s bodies through the use of non-therapeutic medical and surgical interventions like decisions to send a child to a particular church or school. They are a matter of parental choice except in extraordinary cases involving grievous harm. This Article questions the assumption of parental rights that frames the current paradigm for medical decisionmaking for children. Focusing on cases involving eye surgery, human growth hormone, liposuction, and growth stunting, I argue that by allowing parents to subordinate their children’s interests to their own, the current paradigm distorts the parent-child relationship …

The Physician Payments Sunshine Act And The Problem Of Pharmaceutical Companies' Influence Over Prescribing Physicians, Andrew L. Younkins

Andrew L Younkins

Recently, concerns over physicians' conflict of interest have increased as the details of some doctors' consulting relationships with pharmaceutical companies surface. In an effort to cleanse medicine of egregiously conflicted doctors, Senator Grassley proposed of the Physician Payments Sunshine Act ("PPSA") in the Senate last year. The Act mandates reporting of uncommonly large payments by drug companies to doctors, but does not confront the panoply of more subtle yet more powerful methods the drug industry uses to influence prescriber behavior. This paper argues that industry-sponsored CME, small gifts, drug samples and drug detailers unconsciously influence physician prescribing behavior, and that …

Promoting, Prescribing, And Pushing Pills: Understanding The Lessons Of Antipsychotic Drug Litigation, Douglas Mossman, Jill Louise Steinberg

Douglas Mossman

Ineffectiveness of prescription drugs, hidden drug hazards, and advertising violations have led to several drug recalls and numerous lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies in recent years. These suits have involved several varieties of medications, but psychoactive medications have figured especially prominently. A recent $1.4 billion settlement by Eli Lilly & Company related to improper promotion of its top-selling drug olanzapine included the largest individual corporate criminal fine in U.S. history. Improper promotion is far from the sole reason why olanzapine and other “second-generation” antipsychotic (SGA) drugs have become so successful. Rather, the widespread adoption of SGAs represents a collective judgment error …

Incompetence To Maintain A Divorce Action: When Breaking Up Is Odd To Do, Douglas Mossman, Amanda N. Shoemaker

Douglas Mossman

The law has well-established provisions for handling divorce actions initiated on behalf of persons already adjudged incompetent or by competent individuals against incompetent spouses. But how should a court respond if a mentally ill petitioner who is competent to manage most personal affairs seeks to divorce a spouse for bizarre, very odd, or crazy-sounding reasons? Whether to allow a divorce action when the petitioner is motivated by psychotic ideas about a spouse is a matter addressed in just a few published cases, and then only indirectly. Largely unanswered are questions about whether domestic relations courts have the authority to stop …

The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act: A New Look At An Old Problem, Sagit Ziskind

Sagit Ziskind

Following more than a decade of congressional and academic debate, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (GINA) was signed into law. GINA forbids health insurers from making coverage determinations based on genetic information from a broad range of sources. GINA has put an end to a patchwork of inconsistent state and federal laws regulating the use of genetic information by the health insurance industry. This essay offers a new framework for understanding the merits of GINA and the appropriateness of its scope. Drawing on economic rationales, this essay shows that genetics legislation pre-GINA failed to adequately advance the principle …

Responding, Rather Than Reacting To, Race In Biomedical Research: A Response To Professors Caulfield And Mwaria, Michael J. Malinowski

Michael J. Malinowski

This Commentary is part of a colloquy on race-based genetics research.

Bad Medicine, Brian K. Pinaire, Milton Heumann, Simon Burger

Brian K. Pinaire

This article provides the first-ever examination of the collateral consequences of felony convictions for physicians in the state of New York. We collected data from 4,739 records of disciplinary actions from 1990 2007 and coded them according to the infraction and the punishment given by the Board of Physician Medical Conduct, or BPMC. We also conducted extensive interviews with elites involved in all facets—and on both sides—of the disciplinary process. Four major findings flow from this research: (1) Of all the disciplinary records in New York, 50% of infractions were felonies and 50% were non-felonies, generally professional infractions; (2) Physicians …

You Take The Embryos But I Get The House (And The Business): Recent Trends In Awards Involving Embryos Upon Divorce, Mark Strasser

Mark Strasser

Various state courts have been asked to decide who should have control of remaining frozen embryos upon divorce. Different models have been proposed, ranging from enforcement of prior agreements to balancing the needs and desires of the parties to requiring both parties to agree before implantation can take place. This article discusses some of these models, concluding both that the enforcement of the initial agreement model is preferable to the others proposed and that one of the most popular current models--the contemporaneous consent model—is a public policy disaster that should be repudiated at the earliest opportunity.

Smoking Out The Impact Of Tobacco-Related Decisions On Public Health Law, Micah Berman

Micah Berman

This article seeks to uncover and analyze the role that tobacco-related litigation has played in the evolution of public health law doctrine. Tobacco is a product – and public health problem – unlike any other. It is the only legal consumable product that kills approximately one-half of the people who consume it, and it cannot be used safely in moderation. These and other characteristics make tobacco use a highly unusual public health issue, and therefore courts addressing tobacco-related litigation have often streched or distorted precedents in order to accommodate the unique exigencies of such cases. In turn, these decisions have …

Between Hope And Evil: Reframing Disability Allowances, Sagit Mor

Sagit Mor

The paper identifies and traces the roots of a fundamental tension that underlies disability politics with regard to disability allowances: are cash benefits an archaic and outdated form of assistance to disabled people, or are they still a relevant mode of response to systematic marginalization and exclusion? Based on a field study of the Israeli disability community the paper shows that while disability rights advocates tend to reject disability allowances as fundamentally wrong and to support the transformation of society's social structures, welfare activists tend to view disability allowances as responding to the most pressing needs of poor disabled people. …

Toward A Distributive Commons In Patent Law, Peter Lee

Peter Lee

While patents provide incentives to invent and develop new inventions, they can constrain access to vital health technologies such as medicines, diagnostics, and nutritional innovations. These access constraints can severely compromise human health, particularly for low-income populations, and have elicited severe criticism. Against this seemingly intractable background, this Article explores methods for integrating distributive values in the patent system while remaining sensitive to property rights and private ordering. Rather than look inward to existing patent doctrine, this Article finds solutions in the political economy of life sciences research. In particular, this Article argues that public institutions, which contribute enormous amounts …

Dialogue With A Neurosurgeon: Toward A Dépeçage Approach To Achieve Tort Reform And Preserve Corrective Justice In Medical Malpractice Cases, Jeffrey A. Van Detta

Jeffrey A. Van Detta

comprised of a dialogue between me, a law professor who teaches torts among a wide array of subjects, and an orthopedic neurosurgeon, who also happens to have been one of my torts students. Our objective is to focus our tort-reform analysis on common errors that occur in complex neurosurgery. We seek to provide a new paradigm both for measuring the standard of care in such malpractice cases and for adjudicating those cases. The dialogue is used as the basis for creating what I call a Dépeçage Model For Classification Of Errors And Resolution Techniques For The Medical Malpractice Claim Arising …

Dialogue With A Neurosurgeon: Toward A Dépeçage Approach To Achieve Tort Reform And Preserve Corrective Justice In Medical Malpractice Cases, Jeffrey A. Van Detta

Jeffrey A. Van Detta

This article is comprised of a dialogue between me, a law professor who teaches torts among a wide array of subjects, and an orthopedic neurosurgeon, who also happens to have been one of my torts students. Our objective is to focus our tort-reform analysis on common errors that occur in complex neurosurgery. We seek to provide a new paradigm both for measuring the standard of care in such malpractice cases and for adjudicating those cases. The dialogue is used as the basis for creating what I call a Dépeçage Model For Classification Of Errors And Resolution Techniques For The Medical …

Public Health Law For A Brave New World: Book Review: Lawrence O. Gostin, Public Health Law: Power, Duty, Restraint, Elizabeth A. Weeks

Elizabeth A. Weeks

This is book review of Lawrence O. Gostin’s new edition of Public Health Law: Power, Duty, Restraint (University of California Press, Berkeley, California, 2d ed., 2008). A review of a second edition of a book may be somewhat unusual as subsequent editions of already published works typically do not break new ground. But this book is different. Gostin’s first edition, published in 2000, established and defined the modern field of public health law. The revised and expanded second edition emerges in the post-9/11, post-Katrina, post-Bush world. Gostin now seeks to apply public health paradigms to social problems beyond the field’s …

Substance Abuse In America: Then And Now, Edward Perez

Edward Perez

The purpose of this paper is to review drug diversion from one of the first national drug diversion programs in the country, Treatment Alternatives to Street Crime (TASC) which commenced in the early 1970's to a contempoary version referred to as The Drug Courts. One of the authors, Visiting Professor Edward Perez, Uiversity of La Verne, College of Law was personally involved with a test project in San Diego County, CA. in 1974. The paper reviews the success of such programs, the law associated with drug diversion, the controversy surrounding federal sentencing guidelines for drug crimes and personal interviews with …

Race In The War On Drugs: The Social Consequences Of Presidential Rhetoric, Jeff L. Yates, Andrew Whitford

Jeff L Yates

One of the president’s main leadership tools for influencing the direction of American legal policy is public rhetoric. Numerous studies have examined the president’s use of the “bully pulpit” to lead policy by influencing Congress or public opinion, or by changing the behavior of public agencies. We argue that the president can use rhetoric to change the behavior of public agencies and that this can have important social consequences. We focus on the disproportionate impact of presidential rhetoric on different “target populations” in the context of the War on Drugs. Specifically, we observe that presidential rhetoric had a greater impact …

The Costs Of Multiple Gestation Pregnancies In Assisted Reproduction, Urska Velikonja

Urska Velikonja

The United States, unlike most developed countries, does not regulate its fertility industry. Rather, it has vested control over the industry to professional organizations and to market forces. While lack of regulation has produced a vibrant market for ART services, it has also produced an undesirable consequence: a high rate of multiple gestation pregnancies. In this article I summarize the data on the medical, psychological, and financial costs associated with multiple pregnancies to the parents, the children, and the American society. I suggest that the current U.S. regulatory regime has not only failed to address these costs as they surfaced, …

The Nigerian Social Health Insurance System And The Challenges Of Access To Health Care: An Antidote Or A White Elephant?, Obiajulu Nnamuchi

Obiajulu Nnamuchi

This paper is an excursion into the operation of the recently launched National Health Insurance Scheme of Nigeria. Its primary task is to determine whether social health insurance in Nigeria, as expressed in the statute establishing the scheme, has prospects for actualizing its promise of, inter alia, ensuring access to affordable health care for every Nigerian. To make this determination, the paper critically analyzes key components of the scheme, focusing on the different actors and issues, the interplay of which is crucial to the scheme's successful implementation. Regrettably, the depth and breadth of the analysis are somewhat constrained by the …