Law Commons^™

Defining Health Affordability, Govind C. Persad

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Affordable health care, insurance, and prescription drugs are priorities for the public and for policymakers. Yet the lack of a consensus definition of health affordability is increasingly recognized as a roadblock to health reform efforts. This Article explains how and why American health law invokes health affordability and attempts, or fails, to define the concept. It then evaluates potential affordability definitions and proposes strategies for defining affordability more clearly and consistently in health law.

Part I examines the role health affordability plays in American health policy, in part by contrasting the United States’s health system with systems elsewhere. Part II …

The New Over-The-Counter Oral Contraceptive Pill—Assessing Financial Barriers To Access, Christopher Robertson, Anna Braman

Faculty Scholarship

In July 2023, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Opill (norgestrel), the first over-the-counter (OTC) daily oral contraceptive pill in the United States, a move that could dramatically improve practical access to family planning. Opill’s price, however, hasn’t been made public and may not be revealed until the drug enters the market in early 2024. Although contraceptive pills generally cost between $10 and $50 per month without insurance, there’s no indication that Opill’s price will fall within this range. In addition, although the manufacturer (Perrigo) has expressed interest in a consumer-assistance program, it hasn’t released details regarding eligibility for …

Pro-Choice Plans, Brendan S. Maher

Faculty Scholarship

After Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the United States Constitution may no longer protect abortion, but a surprising federal statute does. That statute is called the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (“ERISA”), and it has long been one of the most powerful preemptive statutes in the entire United States Code. ERISA regulates “employee benefit plans,” which are the vehicle by which approximately 155 million people receive their health insurance. Plans are thus a major private payer for health benefits—and therefore abortions. While many post-Dobbs anti-abortion laws directly bar abortion by making either the receipt or provision of …

Global Pull Incentives For Better Antibacterials: The Uk Leads The Way, Kevin Outterson, John Rex

Faculty Scholarship

The article from Leonard and the team from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, NHS England, and NHS Improvement [1] asks the question whether the UK subscription program can restore the antibacterial pipeline, with an insiders’ description of the process and strategy that led to implementation (briefly, a ‘pull incentive’ of reimbursement for new antibacterials that is delinked from volume of sales with payments based on the added value to the whole health and social care system).

Governments [2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9], academics …

Sanitation: Reducing The Administrative State’S Control Over Public Health, Lauren R. Roth

Scholarly Works

On April 18, 2022, in Health Freedom Defense Fund, Inc. v. Biden, United States District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle vacated the mask mandate issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Following a framework laid out in other decisions restricting CDC actions in response to COVID-19, the court found that the agency lacked statutory authority to protect the public from the virus by requiring mask wearing during travel and at transit hubs because Congress did not intend such a broad grant of power. Countering decades of public health jurisprudence, the federal district court failed to defer to experts and …

Warrantying Health Equity, Heather Payne, Jennifer Oliva

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The United States is experiencing a significant rise in the prevalence of asthma and other debilitating respiratory and cardiovascular ailments that disproportionately burden low income and marginalized Americans. This is due in large measure to climate change, which is responsible for increasingly devastating air quality events—including wildfires and drought—that trigger these serious health conditions. As a result, it is imperative that we begin to explore potential legal and policy reforms that rein in sources of health-impairing air pollution.

The common law of property has long implied in residential leasing arrangements a warranty guaranteed by landlords to tenants that the premises …

Publicizing Corporate Secrets, Christopher J. Morten

Faculty Scholarship

Federal regulatory agencies in the United States hold a treasure trove of valuable information essential to a functional society. Yet little of this immense and nominally “public” resource is accessible to the public. That worrying phenomenon is particularly true for the valuable information that agencies hold on powerful private actors. Corporations regularly shield vast swaths of the information they share with federal regulatory agencies from public view, claiming that the information contains legally protected trade secrets (or other proprietary “confidential commercial information”). Federal agencies themselves have largely acceded to these claims and even fueled them, by construing restrictively various doctrines …

Reevaluating Regional Law Reform Strategies After Dobbs, Jamie Abrams

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This article studies the triad of 2016 social media campaigns known as “#AskDr.Kasich,” “#askbevinaboutmyvag,” and “#PeriodsforPence.” While these campaigns, each located in the regional mid-South, were motivated by restrictive state abortion bills, they uniquely positioned menstruation and women’s bodies at the center of their activism—not abortion alone. They leveraged, as a political fault line, the contradiction of these states’ governors’ perceived disgust relating to basic women’s reproductive health, relative to their patriarchal assuredness in regulating and controlling women’s bodies.

In so doing, they tapped into meaningful disruptions in the geographies, religiosities, and masculinities of abortion politics. These campaigns achieved regional …

Come As You Are?: Democratizing Healthcare Through Black Church - Telehealth Initiatives, Meighan Parker

Scholarly Works

Drawing from the phrase “come as you are,” which is frequently used in Black Churches to encourage and welcome people to church spaces for spiritual restoration and healing irrespective of their various social and economic dispositions, this Article aims to describe how telehealth partnerships with community organizations, such as Black Churches, can help democratize healthcare.

In this project, I develop two models for Black Church-Telehealth Initiatives—a Telehealth Clinic on the Church’s campus and a Designated Telehealth Space with the requisite technology to facilitate telehealth encounters—to argue that Black Church-Telehealth Initiatives can help address certain social determinants of health, such as …

The Who’S 75th Anniversary: Who At A Pivotal Moment In History, Lawrence O. Gostin, Danwood Mzikenge Chirwa, Helen Clark, Roojin Habibi, Björn Kümmel, Jemilah Mahmood, Benjamin Mason Meier, Winnie Mpanju-Shumbusho, K. Srinath Reddy, Attiya Waris, Miriam Were

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The World Health Organisation (WHO) was inaugurated in 1948 to bring the world together to ensure the highest attainable standard of health for all. Establishing health governance under the United Nations (UN), WHO was seen as the preeminent leader in public health, promoting a healthier world following the destruction of World War II and ensuring global solidarity to prevent disease and promote health. Its constitutional function would be ‘to act as the directing and coordinating authority on international health work’. Yet today, as the world commemorates WHO’s 75th anniversary, it faces a historic global health crisis, with governments presenting challenges …