Medical Jurisprudence Commons^™

Uncle Sam Knows What’S In Your Medicine Cabinet: The Security And Privacy Protection Of Health Records Under The Hitech Act, 30 J. Marshall J. Info. Tech. & Privacy L. 667 (2014), Ranjit Janardhanan

UIC John Marshall Journal of Information Technology & Privacy Law

No abstract provided.

Uncovering The Silent Victims Of The American Medical Liability System, Joanna Shepherd

Vanderbilt Law Review

A frequently overlooked problem with the current medical liability system is the vast number of medical errors that go uncompensated. Although studies indicate that 1% of hospital patients are victims of medical negligence, fewer than 2% of these injured patients file claims. In this Article, I explain that many victims of medical malpractice do not file claims because they are unable to find attorneys willing to take their cases. I conducted the first national survey of attorneys to explore medical malpractice victims' access to the civil justice system. The results from the survey indicate that the economic reality of litigation …

Unfinished Business: The Affordable Care Act And The Problem Of Delayed And Denied Erisa Health Care Claim, 47 J. Marshall L. Rev. 887 (2014), Katherine Vukadin

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Taking Hipaa To School: Why The Privacy Rule Has Eviscerated Ferpa's Privacy Protections, 47 J. Marshall L. Rev. 1047 (2014), Gregory Riggs

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Statutory Solutions For A Common Law Defect: Advancing The Nurse Practitioner-Patient Privilege, 47 J. Marshall L. Rev. 1077 (2014), Rebecca Pierce

UIC Law Review

This Comment advocates the necessity for a statutory nurse practitioner-patient privilege throughout the states.

Legal Inconsistencies After Astrue V. Caputo: When Children Are Conceived Postmortem, Does Society Have An Obligation To Support Those Children?, 47 J. Marshall L. Rev. 1101 (2014), Catherine Durkin Stewart

UIC 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 …

Limiting Liberty To Prevent Obesity: Justifiability Of Strong Hard Paternalism In Public Health Regulation, Thaddeus Mason Pope

Faculty Scholarship

Because of the largely self-regarding nature of obesity, many current and proposed public health regulatory measures are paternalistic. That is, these measures interfere with a person’s liberty with the primary goal of improving that person’s own welfare.

Paternalistic public health measures may be effective in reducing obesity. They may even be the only sufficiently effective type of regulation. But many commentators argue that paternalistic public health measures are not politically viable enough to get enacted. After all, paternalism is repugnant in our individualistic culture. It is "wrong" for the government to limit our liberty for our own good.

In this …

Testing The Boundaries Of Family Privacy: The Special Case Of Pediatric Sibling Transplants, Doriane Lambelet Coleman

Faculty Scholarship

A six-year-old girl suffers third-degree burns over eighty percent of her body. Her chance of survival with minimal scarring is said to depend on her identical twin sister’s availability as an organ source. There are other transplant options—including the parents—but because the twins’ skin is “equivalent,” a “sibling transplant” is likely to result in a better medical and aesthetic outcome for the burned twin. Her doctor thus proposes to harvest her healthy sister’s skin on “her backside from her bra line down to the bottom of her buttocks or possibly her thighs.” This procedure would be repeated up to three …

Aligning Incentives In Accountable Care Organizations: The Role Of Medical Malpractice Reform, Laura Hermer

Faculty Scholarship

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) encourages physicians, hospitals, and other health care providers to deliver better coordinated, high-quality care through the institution of the Medicare Shared Savings Program. Many physicians and other providers moved quickly after the ACA was enacted to enter into arrangements that would allow them to take advantage of the MSSP and similar programs sponsored by private insurers that likely would — and did — arrive on the MSSP’s heels.

Yet despite the initial enthusiasm, it is by no means clear that ACOs will succeed, whether individually or in the greater goal of changing …

Introduction: Mental Health, Psychology, And The Law, Mary Kay Kisthardt

Faculty Works

The authors coordinated and edited a symposium law review issue on Mental Health, Psychology and the Law. The Introduction summarizes submissions that included a memoir from an author whose family members were consumers of mental health services, legal scholars and practitioners who use mental health evidence to defend clients facing the death penalty, and the duty of attorneys to tend to their own mental health care needs while dealing with these emotionally heavy issues.

Informed Consent And The Differential Diagnosis: How The Law Overestimates Patient Autonomy And Compromises Health Care, 60 Wayne L. Rev. 349 (2014), Marc Ginsberg

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

The purpose of this paper is not simply to re-examine the doctrine of informed consent. The purpose, however, is to identify how the doctrine has evolved, its scope expanded, and how it has created serious consequences for physicians and patients. Specifically, this paper focuses on the differential diagnosis - the process by which a physician arrives at a diagnosis - and how some jurisdictions have manipulated informed consent to encompass this process. This paper will urge that the application of informed consent to the differential diagnosis is an unnecessary expansion of the doctrine and, potentially, compromises health care.

Success And Failure In Adr: A Dialogue Between Partners, Lela P. Love, Joseph B. Stulberg

Articles

Love and Stulberg critically discuss policy, scholarly, and practice developments in four areas of program development in the area historically referenced as alternative dispute resolution (ADR): the range of process options; the impact of court procedures on ADR program development and practice; the nature of ADR scholarship and training; and the general public's receptiveness to or rejection of the normative principles that structure ADR collaborative processes. Their concluding remarks suggest that the promise of ADR, particularly of the mediation process, remains inspiring to many, even if its effective implementation remains uneven.

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

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

The Future Of Medicaid Supplemental Payments: Can They Promote Patient-Centered Care?, Laura Hermer, Merle Lenihan

Faculty Scholarship

Supplemental Medicaid payments such as DSH and UPL are the exception to the financing of specific services to specific patients. Medicaid DSH funds currently finance over 30 percent of hospital care to the uninsured. As a result of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), DSH funds will be substantially reduced. At the same time, their importance will be heightened, especially in states that refuse to take up the ACA’s Medicaid expansion. DSH payments to hospitals have been plagued by a lack of accountability and transparency and an inability to assess whether patients benefit from such payments. Flexibility in the DSH program …

Pinwheel Of Fortune, 13 J. Marshall Rev. Intell. Prop. L. 761 (2014), James Ming Chen

UIC Review of Intellectual Property Law

This paper examines public health law in the context of prospect theory, the leading behavioral account of risk aversion and risk-seeking. The paper first demonstrates how international environmental law can be mapped along prospect theory’s risk-seeking axis. It then completes this picture of prospect theory by examining National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, which upheld the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“PPACA”). Although Sebelius upheld the PPACA as an exercise of the federal government’s taxing authority, it reasoned that a directive aimed at uninsured individuals to buy health insurance lay beyond the power of Congress …

A Scientific Approach To Intellectual Property And Health: Innovation, Access, And A Forgotten Corner Of The Universal Declaration Of Human Rights, 13 J. Marshall Rev. Intell. Prop. L. 794 (2014), Adam Houston

UIC Review of Intellectual Property Law

For years, there has been vigorous debate over the relationship between intellectual property and health, especially in the context of pharmaceutical patents. Despite numerous attempts to strike a balance between innovation and access, however, few have looked to Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for guidance. Article 27, and its further elaboration and codification under Article 15 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, explicitly address this balance by pairing the right of everyone “to share in scientific advancement and its benefits” with a similarly universal right of authors to “material interests resulting” from …

When Is A Change Going To Come?: Separate And Unequal Treatment In Health Care Fifty Years After Title Vi Of The Civil Rights Act Of 1964, Ruqaiijah A. Yearby

All Faculty Scholarship

ON June 19, 1963, when the Civil Rights Act was first introduced, President John F. Kennedy said in a message to Congress:

Events of recent weeks have again underlined how deeply our Negro citizens resent the injustice of being arbitrarily denied equal access to those facilities and accommodations, which are otherwise open to the general public. That is a daily insult, which has no place in a country proud of its heritage-- the heritage of the melting pot, of equal rights, of one nation and one people. No one has been barred on account of his race from fighting or …

Uncovering The Silent Victims Of The American Medical Liability System, Joanna Shepherd

Faculty Articles

A frequently overlooked problem with the current medical liability system is the vast number of medical errors that go uncompensated. Although studies indicate that 1% of hospital patients are victims of medical negligence, fewer than 2% of these injured patients file claims. In this Article, I explain that many victims of medical malpractice do not file claims because they are unable to find attorneys willing to take their cases.

I conducted the first national survey of attorneys to explore medical malpractice victims' access to the civil justice system. The results from the survey indicate that the economic reality of litigation …

Rationalizing Home And Community-Based Services Under Medicaid, Laura Hermer

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines efforts states are making to expand access to community-based services for elderly and disabled Medicaid beneficiaries and suggests several options that might improve such access nationally. Like much of Medicaid, Medicaid long term services and supports (LTSS) have developed through a complex process of accretion. Policymakers appear only rarely to have considered an overarching view of such services and the needs of those who require them. Rationalizing Medicaid LTSS will accordingly require not only additions but also substantial pruning, and may even warrant a reconsideration of who should have ultimate authority to develop and direct such services. …

A New Life For Wrongful Living, Nadia N. Sawicki

Faculty Publications & Other Works

No abstract provided.

Compelling Images: The Constitutionality Of Emotionally Persuasive Health Campaigns, Nadia N. Sawicki

Faculty Publications & Other Works

Legislation requiring the display of emotionally compelling graphic imagery in medical and public health contexts is on the rise-two examples include the Food and Drug Administration's recently abandoned tobacco labeling regulations, which would have imposed images of diseased lungs and cancerous lesions on cigarette packaging, and state laws requiring physicians to display and describe ultrasound images to women seeking abortions. This Article highlights the disconnect between the constitutional challenges to these laws, which focus on the perils of compelling speakers to communicate messages with which they may disagree, and the public's primary objections, which are grounded in ethical concerns about …

Abortion, Religion, And The Accusation Of Establishment: A Critique Of Justice Stevens’ Opinions In Thornburgh, Webster, And Casey, John M. Breen

Faculty Publications & Other Works

It is commonplace to characterize legal arguments in favor of protecting the human embryo or fetus as “inherently religious” such that laws embodying this point of view constitute an establishment of religion in violation of the First Amendment. The practical effect of this argumentative strategy is to foreclose substantive debate on the issue of the legal status of the unborn – to preclude from consideration an entire point of view and so win an argument without ever really having one.

This claim has a long pedigree, tracing back to the founding of NARAL and Lawrence Lader’s “Catholic strategy.” Its most …

A Continuing War With Asbestos: The Stalemate Among State Courts On Liability For Take-Home Asbestos Exposure, Meghan E. Flinn

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Concussions And Sports: Introduction, David Orentlicher

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

A Restatement Of Health Care Law, David Orentlicher

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Aging Populations And Physician Aid In Dying: The Evolution Of State Government Policy, David Orentlicher

Scholarly Works

Professor David Orentlicher explores the evolution of physician assisted suicide from illegal taboo to the passage of Death with Dignity legislation and caselaw.

Employer-Based Health Care Insurance: Not So Exceptional After All, David Orentlicher

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

The Changing Legal Climate For Physician Aid In Dying, David Orentlicher

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

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

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.