Health Law and Policy Commons^™

Catching The Forgotten: Repairing The Safety Net For Cofa Migrants In The United States, Brian Aguilar

Lewis & Clark Law Review

Citizens of the Freely Associated States—the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, and the Republic of Belau—are permitted to live and work in the United States without a visa under the Compacts of Free Association (COFA). Yet, for nearly three decades, COFA migrants were excluded from the federal public benefits safety net. This exclusion, a product of legislative oversight in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, devastated communities like the Marshallese in Springdale, Arkansas, who endured dangerous working conditions, poverty, and severe health vulnerabilities without access to critical federal benefits programs. While …

Dental Professionalism In A Changing World: Challenges & Opportunities, Robert P. Iovino, Dds, Ma Dds, Ma

Journal of the American College of Dentists

This manuscript examines the erosion of traditional dental professionalism amid rising educational costs, declining membership in professional associations, and the growing influence of corporate ownership and private equity in dentistry. Drawing perspectives from economics, sociology, philosophy, law, and ethics, it traces the historical development of professional licensure and its role in safeguarding clinical autonomy, ethical integrity, and public trust. The analysis highlights how deregulation and profit-driven practice models challenge the profession’s social contract. The manuscript argues that preserving strong civic institutions, restrictive licensure standards, and humanities-informed education is essential to sustaining dentistry as a learned profession rather than a commodified …

Dampak Peraturan Daerah Terkait Kesehatan Terhadap Prevalensi Stunting Tingkat Kabupaten/Kota Di Indonesia, Cakra Yudi Putra, Teguh Dartanto

Jurnal Ekonomi dan Pembangunan Indonesia

Stunting remains a major public health challenge in Indonesia with long-term impacts on health, cognition, and productivity. This study examines whether health-related regional regulations (Peraturan Daerah or Perda) reduce stunting prevalence across 338 districts/municipalities in 2007 and 2013. Using Difference-in-Differences (DiD) and DiD with Propensity Score Matching (DiD-PSM) on secondary data from Riskesdas, Statistics Indonesia (BPS), and the Legal Documentation and Information Network (JDIH), we find no statistically significant causal effect of cumulative health Perda on stunting reduction, although OLS shows a negative association. Sanitation significantly reduces stunting in eastern Indonesia. Findings highlight the need for evidence-based, multisectoral, measurable, implementable, …

Excluded At The Root: Health Insurance Discrimination Against Hair Loss Conditions, Stacey A. Tovino, Tracy Hresko Pearl

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Cybersecurity Risk Shifting, Deborah R. Farringer

Law Faculty Scholarship

This article analyzes the growing problem of ransomware attacks in the healthcare sector and evaluates the evolving legal frameworks used to address cybersecurity risks affecting patient data. The authors trace the rapid increase in ransomware incidents, driven in part by the rise of digital health records and cryptocurrency-enabled extortion, and highlight the significant operational and privacy harms resulting from such attacks. The article critically examines existing federal and state legal mechanisms—including statutes such as HIPAA, criminal fraud provisions, and emerging state-level immunity laws—and argues that current approaches are insufficient due to jurisdictional challenges, particularly the transnational nature of cybercrime and …

The Impact Of Substance Abuse Problems And Serious Mental Illness/Serious Emotional Distress On Post-Discharge Residential Status Among Clients With Behavioral And Cognitive Disorders: Evidence From Samhsa Mh-Cld Data, Eden Moges, Norma Rochez, William Peycha, Aditya Chakraborty

Epidemiology, Biostatistics, & Environmental Health Faculty Publications

BACKGROUND: Behavioral and cognitive disorders can undermine housing stability, a key determinant of mental health recovery, with persistent disparities across demographic and socioeconomic groups. This study examined the associations of substance abuse problems (SAP) and serious mental illness/serious emotional distress (SMISED) with residential status at discharge from mental health facilities.

METHODS: This cross-sectional study used the utilized data from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). Descriptive statistics were used to summarize demographic characteristics, whereas univariate and multivariable logistic regression models were employed to assess associations between the covariates and the residential outcome, adjusting for a variety of …

Enfranchising Fluoride: A Case For Democratic Decision-Making In What We Drink, Samuel N. Dick, R. Chase Bailey

Wyoming Law Review

For years, the addition of fluoride in drinking water has been hailed as a powerful agent for dental health. But the closer you look, the more cracks appear—making the truth that much harder to swallow.

This Article is the first to look objectively at the benefits and risks of water fluoridation following Food & Water Watch, Inc. v. EPA. Notably, the court there held that fluoride poses an unreasonable risk to human health, marking a striking departure from those who, as recently as 2024, have continued to herald water fluoridation as one of the greatest public health interventions of …

An Incidental Standard For Medical Ai, Nicholson W. Price Ii

Articles

Medical AI is poised to make a major difference in the provision of health. It brings major challenges, though: how can developers and implementers ensure that it will work safely and effectively—especially within the context of complex and highly variable health-care systems? Standards provide one key tool, potentially providing guidelines for everything from privacy to accuracy to how AI interacts with human clinicians. This Essay considers the last of these, describing a powerful quasi-standard from a surprising source: an FDA guidance document that tells developers when certain AI systems are not considered medical devices, and are therefore not regulated by …

Let’S Talk About The Biological Reality Of Sex, Baby, John Parsi

FIU Law Review

Sex is at the very core of individual identity. It affects the conception of the self and the way others view the individual. Every day, one’s sex may open and close doors, access to communities, and opportunities. Laws that define sex may affirm scientific knowledge and protect people, or threaten to unravel the facts and the reality of sex. A deep unmooring of sex is underway, and this Article aims to halt it. On day one of the current presidential term, January 20, 2025, President Trump signed an Executive Order on “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological …

The Weight Of Stigma, Rebekah A. King, Michael S. Sinha

All Faculty Scholarship

Many health care providers, both implicitly and explicitly, perpetuate stigma in their treatment of patients classified as obese. While medical professionals understand that a one-size-fits-all approach to treatment is ineffective, patients classified as obese are frequently offered limited treatment options that fail to account for their unique needs. Access to a range of effective treatment options has historically been limited, but new GLP-1 receptor agonist medicines like Wegovy (semaglutide) and Zepbound (tirzepatide), have shown incredible promise in addressing the obesity crisis. Unfortunately, these transformative drugs are costly, in high demand, and not widely covered by insurance, rendering them inaccessible for …

The Asexual Assumption, Faith K. Whatley-Blaine, Michael S. Sinha

All Faculty Scholarship

Inclusion-focused dating shows such as ‘Love on the Spectrum’ feature individuals with developmental or neurological disabilities on a quest for love. Despite the focus on disability representation, these shows perpetuate stigma against the disabled community by fostering an infantilizing portrayal of individuals with disabilities. This portrayal undermines the premise of encouraging meaningful romantic relationships and reinforces the stigmatizing association of asexuality with disability. This framing aligns with the broader societal narrative that individuals with disabilities are incapable of or lack interest in participating in romantic relationships or physical intimacy.

The stigma that associates asexuality with disability extends beyond mere entertainment, …

The Deregulation Of Cancer, Daniel G. Aaron

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Fifty years ago, the U.S. embarked on a radical new path. Under pressure from the environmental movement, Congress passed an array of statutes aimed at regulating carcinogens out of our world. This regulatory experiment sprawled from air and water to food and consumer products.

Legal scholars have paid scant attention to this wave of cancer regulation despite its size and importance and the public’s apparent interest in avoiding carcinogens. But there is a growing literature finding flaws with individual regimes within the framework, such as the Clean Air Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act, and the Tobacco Control Act. In …

The Crisis In U.S. Cancer Care: Law, Markets, And Privatization, Daniel G. Aaron

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Cancer is surging among youth and young adults in the U.S., yet instead of public regulation addressing its root causes, we have outsourced the management of cancer to the private sector.  A suite of laws, embodying faith that corporations will cure cancer, has subsidized the cancer biomedical enterprise and transformed quasi-public institutions into marketized, profit-seeking entities.  These changes, across patent law, healthcare law, innovation law, and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) law, have privatized cancer. 

The market failures I describe in U.S. cancer care raise larger questions about who we entrust with managing critical social problems.  This Article provides theoretical …

The Power And Peril Of The Aca's Universality At Fifteen, Nicole Huberfeld

Faculty Scholarship

As part of the symposium "15th Anniversary of the ACA: A Health Equity Review," this essay explores the ACA's mix of private law and public law provisions that rendered measurable improvements in health equity and health outcomes, especially for populations that experienced longstanding health disparities before its enactment.  Congress’s central objective was near-universal health insurance coverage, and the ACA employed a variety of mechanisms to reach that goal. The law’s health equity successes grew from establishing a principle of inclusion across federal statutes. This principle, which I have called “universality,” centered a human right to health approach: No longer would …

Corporate Childrearing, Katharine B. Silbaugh

Faculty Scholarship

With children influencing a trillion dollars in spending annually, corporations actively seek to shape children's identities in support of consumer culture and profit. Yet there are no scholarly treatments or theories of the legal relationship between children and corporations. Instead, scholars address individual industries such as food, social media, cosmetics, tobacco, or fashion, missing the structural role corporations play in children's identity formation. Family law evaluates child wellbeing interventions using a triangle to map the legal dynamics among child, parent, and state. This article adds corporations as fourth actors, reconceptualizing that triangle as a square. This square provides the first …

The Anti-Federalism Of Hr1, Nicole Huberfeld

Faculty Scholarship

The budget reconciliation bill signed on July 4, 2025 (“HR1”) weakened the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) and its core goal of near-universal health insurance coverage. To maintain 2017 tax cuts, Congress curtailed the ACA’s Medicaid eligibility expansion; simultaneously, HR1 limited the kinds of options states have been able to exercise within Medicaid while pushing the costs of deep cuts down to states. This essay argues that HR1 embodies an anti-federalism approach, and that anti-federalism is not the same as federalizing health reforms. In the past, Congress sometimes federalized health care or public health reforms to respond to …

Regulating Crisis Pregnancy Centers After Nifla And Dobbs: Controversies Over When Government Is Imposing An Orthodoxy About Abortion, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

How does this broader sense of Barnette’s proscription of government from imposing “what shall be orthodox” implicate governmental restrictions on reproductive autonomy? Battles over reproductive freedom centrally implicate objections that government is unconstitutionally imposing a gender orthodoxy. Arguments for a right of personal autonomy embodying an antitotalitarian principle of liberty are arguments for a right to resist governmental imposition of an orthodoxy— for example, an idea about the natural or traditional role of women as mothers together with a view about how best to respect the sanctity of life. Rights to reproductive autonomy, grounded in personal autonomy and equality, …

Social Science Contributions To The Global Action Plan On Antimicrobial Resistance Management, Mathieu Poirier, Jaskeerat Singh, Isaac Weldon, Clare I. R. Chandler, Daniela Corno, Laura Valtere, Pedro Henrique D Batista, Daniel Carelli, Geneviève Boily-Larouche, Sonia Lewycka, Fiona Emdin, Kathleen Liddell, Timo Minssen, Ilaria Natali, Susan Nayiga, Iruka N. Okeke, Emmanuel Olamijuwon, Kevin Outterson, Julianne Piper, Kayla Strong, Jarnail Singh Thakur, Kednapa Thavorn, Maarten Van Der Heijden, A. M. Viens, Mary Wiktorowicz, Steven J. Hoffman

Faculty Scholarship

Social science research on antimicrobial resistance has gained traction in the last decade, employing a diverse set of theoretical perspectives to better understand topics ranging from antimicrobial stewardship to political coordination.4 As the action plan commitments will be updated in 2026, an opportunity exists to employ a broader social science scope to accelerate national antimicrobial resistance interventions.

In January 2025, the Global strategy lab convened leading antimicrobial resistance social scientists from a variety of disciplines to determine which new ways of understanding antimicrobial resistance could catalyse and incentivize action. Three conceptions stood out as important to revisions of the action …

Spending Programs And The New Roberts Court, Nicole Huberfeld

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court is poised to place new limits on Congress’s spending power at the urging of states vying for regulatory dominance, particularly in health care and public health. This article is the first to highlight and catalog the throughlines of argumentation, which sparked after states successfully challenged the ACA but have grown into opposing more than Medicaid’s cooperative federalism. This means federal and state programs that heavily rely on federal spending power are at risk, so studying this pattern is imperative. The article begins with a descriptive account of increasing spending power challenges, which make use of converging factors …

Reproductive Wrongful Convictions: The Making Of "Unfit" Mothers, Valena Beety

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This Article draws a straight line from wrongful convictions of women in the past to criminal charges based on pregnancy and parenting behaviors today. Faulty forensic evidence and biased evidence based on sex-stereotypes have, in combination, been used to convict innocent women, particularly in situations where an accident or health event was misconstrued to be a criminal act. Seventy-four percent of known exonerated women were wrongly convicted where no crime occurred. Similarly, in criminalizing pregnancy behaviors, police, medical personnel, or prosecutors erroneously label a non-criminal event, such as a miscarriage or stillbirth, as criminal. Criminal charges are being brought against …