Medical Jurisprudence Commons^™

Remodeling Federal Medical Malpractice Act: A Possible Improvement To The Affordable Care Act, Nancy Kubasek, Tiffany Durham

Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review

During the debates about healthcare reform, the Congressional Budget Office found that federal medical liability reform could drastically reduce federal budget deficits, yet political and legal scholars could not reach agreement about the best way for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) to provide such reform. Instead, provisions were made to fund state level demonstration projects. The law that is considered one of the most successful models to date of conventional tort reform is the Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act of California. This Article exams that legislation and discusses how we might use what can be learned from …

Building A Better Laboratory: The Federal Role In Promoting Health System Experimentation, Kristin Madison

Pepperdine Law Review

While expanding federal involvement in the health care system, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) preserves states' roles as policy laboratories and private providers' roles as health care delivery laboratories. State-based and provider-based laboratories suffer from many shortcomings, however, as mechanisms to develop, evaluate, and facilitate diffusion of reforms within the health system. This Article argues that the federal government can take steps to address these shortcomings. It first briefly reviews ACA provisions that promote policy and delivery experimentation. It then suggests that by tying funding to policy outcomes, making use of regulatory variation and regulatory menus, and …

Silence Is Golden...Except In Health Care Philanthropy, Stacey A. Tovino

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Missing The Forest For The Trees: Why Supplemental Needs Trusts Should Be Exempt From Medicaid Determinations, Jeffrey R. Grimyser

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Supplemental needs trusts are trusts designed to assist individuals with disabilities by paying for services and items that Medicaid will not pay for. Federal law, however, is unclear as to whether using one of these trusts automatically disqualifies someone from receiving Medicaid, thereby causing the circuit courts to split on their interpretation. Some circuits have held that the Medicaid statute allows states to enact laws prohibiting the use of these trusts while receiving Medicaid benefits based on the federal law’s statutory language. While other circuits have ruled that individuals can simultaneously receive Medicaid benefits and use supplemental needs trusts given …

Health Care Reform And Efforts To Encourage Healthy Behavior By Individuals, David Orentlicher

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

The Future Of The Affordable Care Act: Protecting Economic Health More Than Physical Health?, David Orentlicher

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Liberty And Justice For All? Protecting The Right To Privacy For Incapacitated Individuals: The Need For Comprehensive Sterilization Legislation In All Fifty States, Mindy K. Fersel

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The note examines the intersection of disability rights and reproductive rights, highlighting the legal confusion and human rights violations that arise from the lack of comprehensive federal guidance on the sterilization of individuals with disabilities. While landmark Supreme Court decisions like Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade established constitutional protections for reproductive autonomy, the legacy of cases such as Buck v. Bell and inconsistent state statutes continue to undermine the rights of individuals with disabilities. The article argues that the absence of clear legislative frameworks leaves vulnerable populations at risk of exploitation and discrimination, necessitating urgent reform to ensure …

Mandatory Ultrasound Statutes And The First Amendment, Shifting The Constitutional Perspective, Cheri D. Smith

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The jurisprudence of abortion law is replete with instances in which the concerns of the woman seeking the procedure have taken a back seat. The newest battleground in abortion regulation involves mandatory ultrasound statutes touted as informed consent regulations. The analysis of courts confronting these statutes has turned on whether the mandatory disclosures violate the physician's First Amendment right to be free from compelled speech. The particular breed of statute at issue in this paper requires a physician not only to perform an ultrasound, but also to make the images visible to the woman, to make audible the heartbeat, and …

Toward A Jurisprudence Of Drug Regulation, Matthew Herder

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Efforts to foster transparency in biopharmaceutical regulation are well underway: drug manufacturers are, for example, legally required to register clinical trials and share research results in the United States and Europe. Recently, the policy conversation has shifted toward the disclosure of clinical trial data, not just trial designs and basic results. Here, I argue that clinical trial registration and disclosure of clinical trial data are necessary but insufficient. There is also a need to ensure that regulatory decisions that flow from clinical trials — whether positive (i.e. product approvals) or negative (i.e. abandoned products, product refusals, and withdrawals) — are …

The Independent Medicare Advisory Committee: Death Panel Or Smart Governing?, Robert Coleman

Journal of the National Association of Administrative Law Judiciary

No abstract provided.

California And Uncle Sam's Tug-Of-War Over Mary Jane Is Really Harshing The Mellow, Daniel Mortensen

Journal of the National Association of Administrative Law Judiciary

No abstract provided.

"Off With His __": Analyzing The Sex Disparity In Chemical Castration Sentences, Zachary Edmonds Oswald

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Societies around the world have performed castration, in its various forms, on their male and female members for thousands of years, for numerous reasons. Even within the United States, prisoners have been sentenced to castration (as a form of punishment or crime prevention) since the early twentieth century. In recent years, legislatures have perpetuated this practice but with a modern twist. Now, states use chemical injections to castrate their inmates. It turns out, however, that systemic problems plague the chemical castration sentencing regime. These problems arise from the nature of the crimes eligible for chemical castration sentences, the manner of …

The Locality Rule Lives! Why? Using Modern Medicine To Eradicate An “Unhealthy” Law, 61 Drake L. Rev. 321 (2013), Marc Ginsberg

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

The "locality rule" places a geographical dimension on the professional standard of care in medical negligence litigation. It requires the measurement of a physician's conduct by a standard focusing on the geographical location of the treatment provided. This Article traces the origin of the locality rule, discusses its related practical problems, focuses on the states in which it exists, suggests that the rule is archaic, and explains how modern medicine (undergraduate medical education, graduate medical education, state medical licensure, board certification, continuing medical education and practice guidelines) is well positioned to eradicate it.

Nfib V. Sebelius: Proportionality In The Exercise Of Congressional Power, David Orentlicher

Scholarly Works

With its opinion on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the U.S. Supreme Court sparked much discussion regarding the implications of the case for other federal statutes. In particular, scholars have debated the significance of the Court's recognition of an anticoercion limit to the Spending Clause power.

When it recognized an anticoercion limit for the ACA's Medicaid expansion, the Court left considerable uncertainty as to the parameters of that limit. This essay sketches out one valuable and very plausible interpretation of the Court's new anticoercion principle. It also indicates how this new principle can address a long-standing problem …

The Speakers’ Bureau System: A Form Of Peer Selling, Lynette Reid, Matthew Herder

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Physicians need to stay abreast of information about emerging drugs and devices, but the time pressures of clinical practice may limit their ability to do so independently. The companies that manufacture and sell these products have the resources and the motivation to “educate” physicians but cannot be expected to distinguish their marketing goals from physicians’ educational needs. Physicians’ professional associations and regulatory bodies, as well as medical journal publishers and editors, drug and device regulatory agencies, and academic medical institutions, have long debated their respective roles and responsibilities in ensuring the safety, efficacy, and probity of prescribing in light of …

When Everyone Is An Orphan: Against Adopting A Us-Styled Orphan Drug Policy In Canada, Matthew Herder

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Putting aside whether diseases that affect only small numbers of people ("rare diseases") should be prioritized over diseases that are otherwise orphaned, in this paper I argue that a new approach to rare, orphan diseases is needed. The current model, first signaled by the United States’ Orphan Drug Act and subsequently emulated by several other jurisdictions, relies on a set of open-ended criteria and market-based incentives in order to define and encourage drug therapies for rare, orphan diseases. Given a) the biopharmaceutical industries’ growing interest in orphan diseases, b) progress in the sphere of personalized medicines enabling more and more …

The Right To Refuse Life Sustaining Medical Treatment And The Noncompetent Nonterminally Ill Patient: An Analysis Of Abridgment And Anarchy, Elizabeth Helene Adamson

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Hodgson V. Minnesota: Chipping Away At Roe V. Wade In The Aftermath Of Webster, Selina K. Hewitt

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Policy Against Federal Funding For Abortions Extends Into The Realm Of Free Speech After Rust V. Sullivan, Loye M. Barton

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Disappearing Provision: Medical Liability Reform Vanishes From The Patient Protection And Affordable Care Act Despite State Court Split, Rafael Andre Roberti

Legislation and Policy Brief

The legal and medical communities have debated the impact and necessity of medical liability reform for over twenty years. At the heart of the debate is the question of how to strike a balance between compensating patients and their families for the thousands of deaths and injuries resulting from medical errors that occur annually, and encouraging physicians to continue to care for patients across America. While several states have passed medical liability reform laws previously, on March 23, 2010, President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA)—colloquially known as the “health care bill”—that contains provisions on medical …

Federal Efforts To Achieve Mental Health Parity: A Step In The Right Direction, But Discrimination Remains, Lucas Quass

Legislation and Policy Brief

Prior to the 1970s, many healthcare plans in the U.S. offered benefits without discriminating between mental health and general healthcare coverage. In the 1970s and 1980s, the cost of healthcare increased dramatically and employers eliminated or limited mental health benefits in an attempt to reduce insurance costs. To manage insurance costs, employers began using more cost sharing mechanisms and benefit caps on mental health benefits. However, these limitations were not applied equally to mental health and general health benefits and a coverage disparity was created. Today, insurers often do not provide coverage for mental health on the same terms as …

Litigating Federal Health Care Legislation And The Interstices Of Procedure, Wendy Collins Perdue

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Compounding Reform: Reconsidering The Draft Safe Drug Compounding Act Of 2007 In Light Of The Ongoing Fungal Meningitis Outbreak, Colleen Nicholson

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform Caveat

Compounding is the act of combining, mixing or altering ingredients to create a drug tailored to the needs of an individual patient, such as a child who needs a less potent dose, an elderly patient who has trouble swallowing, or an individual with a severe allergy to a drug component. Compounding pharmacies, which engage in large-scale drug compounding, have come under the microscope recently because of the ongoing deadly outbreak of fungal meningitis that began in 2012. Fungal meningitis “occurs when the protective membranes covering the brain and spinal cord are infected with a fungus.” The recent outbreak was caused …

Health Care For The Autistic Child In The U.S.: The Case For Federal Legislative Reform For Aba Therapy, 46 J. Marshall L. Rev. 169 (2012), Laura Hoffman

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Physician Payment Sunshine Act: An Important First Step In Mitigating Financial Conflicts Of Interest In Medical And Clinical Practice, 45 J. Marshall L. Rev. 963 (2012), Alexandros Stamatoglou

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Access To Medicaid: Recognizing Rights To Ensure Access To Care And Services, Colleen Nicholson

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform Caveat

The Supreme Court has defined Medicaid as “a cooperative federal-state program through which the Federal Government provides financial assistance to States so that they may furnish medical care to needy individuals.” In June 2012, the Court found the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act’s (PPACA) Medicaid expansion unconstitutional. The Court took issue with the threat to withhold all of a state’s Medicaid funding if they did not comply with the expansion, finding it coercive and a fundamental shift in the Medicaid paradigm. However, Medicaid in its current form may not always be effective at providing beneficiaries with timely access to …

Shielding Hippocrates: Nevada's Expanded Pleading Standard For Medical Malpractice Actions And The Need For Legislative Reform, Justin Shiroff

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Has Italy Discovered Virgil? Utilizing The British Archetype To Create End-Of-Life Legislation In Italy, Nicholas A. Secara

Cardozo Journal of International and Comparative Law

The note examines the legal and ethical debates surrounding end-of-life rights, focusing on the tension between the right to life and the right to death. It highlights the lack of explicit end-of-life legislation in Italy, the inconsistent application of existing laws, and the ethical dilemmas faced by courts and medical professionals. The analysis compares Italy's legal framework with that of other European countries, such as Switzerland and the UK, and explores the implications of these differences for patients, families, and the medical community.

How (Not) To Regulate Arts: Lessons From Octomom, Radhika Rao

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Medical Malpractice Law, Sean P. Byrne, Lauran G. Stimac

University of Richmond Law Review

Health care reform took center stage on a national level overthe past year. Despite suggestions that medical liability reform might be incorporated into the federal legislation, in the end, it was not. Similarly, this year saw few legislative developments at the state level in medical malpractice law, as the Virginia General Assembly focused its energy primarily on the budget shortfall and other issues. There were, however, several health care legislative and case developments of note which will impact the medical liability landscape in the coming years. Board of Medicine activity and medical malpractice trial results of interest are also highlighted …