Health Law and Policy Commons^™

Guardianship And Its Alternatives: A Handbook On Maryland Law, Virginia Rowthorn, Ellen A. Callegary

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Four Constitutional Limits That The Minimum Coverage Provision Respects, Neil S. Siegel

Faculty Scholarship

Opponents of the minimum coverage provision in the Affordable Care Act charge that if Congress can require most people to obtain health insurance or pay a certain amount of money, then Congress can impose whatever mandates it wishes - or, at least, whatever purchase mandates it wishes. This Essay refutes that claim by identifying four limits on the Commerce Clause that the minimum coverage provision honors. Congress may not use its commerce power: (1) to regulate noneconomic subject matter; (2) to impose a regulation that violates constitutional rights, including the right to bodily integrity; (3) to regulate at all, including …

Access To Information On Safe Abortion: A Harm Reduction And Human Rights Approach, Joanna Erdman

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

With convergence-divergence as an organizing theme, this Article explores harm reduction and human rights as conceptual approaches to and discourses about unsafe abortion. The vehicle for this exploration is access to safer-use information on medication abortion, namely women’s self-administration of the drug misoprostol. More specifically, this Article focuses on the Sanitary Initiative Against Unsafe Abortion (“the Uruguay Model”) as an actualized model or prototype of access to information through physician-patient consultation in restrictive legal environments. On convergence, this Article seeks to test the claim that international human rights law imposes government obligations to provide, and to refrain from interfering with …

Are Canadians Providing Advance Directives About Health Care And Research Participation In The Event Of Decisional Incapacity?, Gina Bravo, Marie-France Dubois, Carole Cohen, Sheila Wildeman, Janice Graham, Karen Painter, Suzanne Bellemare

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Objective: Advance planning for health care and research participation has been promoted as a mechanism to retain some control over one’s life, and ease substitute decision making, in the event of decisional incapacity. Limited data are available on Canadians’ current advance planning activities. We conducted a postal survey to estimate the frequency with which Canadians communicate their preferences about health care and research should they become incapacitated. Method: We surveyed 5 populations (older adults, informal caregivers, physicians, researchers in aging, and research ethics board members) from Nova Scotia, Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia. We asked respondents whether they had expressed …

Restorative Justice, Euthanasia, And Assisted Suicide: A New Arena For Restorative Justice And A New Path For End Of Life Law And Policy In Canada, Jennifer Llewellyn, Jocelyn Downie

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This article examines the current Canadian legal approach to euthanasia and assisted suicide, highlights some of the problems with it, and offers a novel alternative to the current traditionally criminalized prohibitive regime. The authors first describe a restorative justice approach and explain the differences between such an approach and the traditional approach currently in use. They then explain how a restorative justice approach could be implemented in the arena of assisted death, acknowledging the potential challenges in implementation. The authors conclude that taking a restorative justice approach to euthanasia and assisted suicide could enable movement in the seemingly intractable public …

Restorative Justice, Euthanasia, And Assisted Suicide: A New Arena For Restorative Justice And A New Path For End Of Life Law And Policy In Canada, Jennifer Llewellyn, Jocelyn Downie

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This article examines the current Canadian legal approach to euthanasia and assisted suicide, highlights some of the problems with it, and offers a novel alternative to the current traditionally criminalized prohibitive regime. The authors first describe a restorative justice approach and explain the differences between such an approach and the traditional approach currently in use. They then explain how a restorative justice approach could be implemented in the arena of assisted death, acknowledging the potential challenges in implementation. The authors conclude that taking a restorative justice approach to euthanasia and assisted suicide could enable movement in the seemingly intractable public …

Confusion Worse Confounded: A Comment On 'Withdrawl Of Clinical Trials Policy By Canadian Research Institute Is A 'Lost Opportunity For Increased Transparency', Jocelyn Downie, Francoise Baylis

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

According to a recent BMJ article on CIHR's decision to "disappear" its policy on clinical trial registration, "Ian Graham, CIHR's vice president Knowledge Translation and Public Outreach, stated the CIHR policy was removed 'as the overlap [with Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans (TCPS 2)] will cause confusion and inconsistent application of the requirements.'"

Ironically, this explanation is itself confusing and inconsistent with previous decisions made by CIHR. There are at least three areas in which CIHR policy/guidelines overlapped with TCPS 2 (registration and results disclosure of trials, research involving Aboriginal People, and research involving human pluripotent …

Why It's Called The Affordable Care Act, Nicholas Bagley, Jill R. Horwitz

Articles

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (“ACA”) raises numerous policy and legal issues, but none have attracted as much attention from lawyers as Section 1501. This provision, titled “Maintenance of Mini-mum Essential Coverage,” but better known as the “individual mandate,” requires most Americans to obtain health insurance for themselves and their dependents by 2014. We are dismayed that the narrow issue of the mandate and the narrower issue of free riding have garnered so much attention when our nation’s health-care system suffers from countless problems. By improving quality, controlling costs, and extending coverage to the uninsured, the …

Health Care Reform In Virginia: Lessons Learned Before, During, And After The 2011 Virginia General Assembly, Hunter W. Jamerson

Richmond Public Interest Law Review

This article surveys Virginia's initial foray into health care reform. This process began with the Virginia Health Reform Initiative, which had a significant presence in the Virginia 2011 General Assembly session. While the nascent health care reform efforts this session reflect only incremental steps, they are indicative of Virginia's direction and commitment to change. Such change, however, will carry great political and professional strife. This article highlights some examples of the challenges faced on the road to health care reform and discusses possible directions of future legislation in the Virginia General Assembly.

Hidden Truth: The Perils And Protection Of Off-Label Drug And Medical Device Promotion, Gregory Conko

Health Matrix: The Journal of Law-Medicine

No abstract provided.

A Cautious Path Forward On Accountable Care Organizations, Barak D. Richman, Kevin A. Schulman

Faculty Scholarship

The wave of new Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs), spurred by financial incentives in the Affordable Care Act, could become the latest chapter in the steady accumulation of market power by hospitals, health care systems, and physician groups. The main purpose behind forming many ACOs may not be to achieve cost savings but instead to strengthen negotiating power over purchasers in the private sector. This would be an unfortunate sequel to the waves of mergers in the 1990s when health care entities sought to counter market pressure from managed care organizations. The possibility that ACOs might further concentrate health care markets …

The Provider-Monopoly Problem In Health Care, Clark C. Havighurst, Barak D. Richman

Faculty Scholarship

Although federal judges have resisted giving due effect to standard antitrust principles in scrutinizing mergers of nonprofit hospitals, the presence of health insurance makes it especially important to oppose monopoly in health services markets. U.S.-style health insurance gives monopolist providers extraordinary pricing freedom, thus exacerbating monopoly’s usual redistributive effects. Significant allocative inefficiencies - albeit not the kind generally associated with monopoly - also result when the monopolist is a nonprofit hospital. Because it is probably impossible to undo past hospital mergers creating undue market power, we suggest some alternative remedies. One is to apply antitrust rules against "tying" arrangements so …

The Constitutionality Of Collateral Post-Conviction Claims Of Actual Innocence Comment., Craig M. Jacobs

St. Mary's Law Journal

The notion that the state can punish innocent people disrupts public confidence in the usefulness of the criminal justice system. If, by legislative design, the criminal justice system is not concerned with or is accepting of situations where innocent people are punished by the state, should courts take immediate action? Once criminal defendants exhaust the appellate process, Supreme Court Justices have stated, federal courts should not hear claims of actual innocence. Such statements are supported by the federal habeas corpus statute as amended by the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA). AEDPA requires federal habeas courts to …

Respecting The Concept And Limited Liability Of A Series Llc In Texas Comment., Bernie R. Kray

St. Mary's Law Journal

The primary advantage of a limited liability company (LLC) is to shield owners from personal liability for the contract and tort obligations of their business entities. To further protect business assets, practitioners often advised clients to form multiple LLCs, each containing single assets. Yet, business owners managing multiple assets and LLCs often found this approach ineffective and cost-prohibitive. Allowing for a single “master” LLC to compartmentalize different series of properties without the need for a distinct holding company, the “series” LLC was the next step. The series LLC permits companies to partition assets and liabilities among various cells or “series,” …

Benefits Of Opt-In Federalism, The, Brendan Maher

Faculty Articles and Papers

The Affordable Care Act (“ACA”) is a controversial and historic statute that mandates people make insurance bargains. Unacknowledged is an innovative mechanism ACA uses to select the law that governs those bargains: opt-in federalism. Opt-in federalism – in which individuals choose between federal and state rules – is a promising theoretical means to make and choose law. This Article explains why, and concludes that the appeal of opt-in federalism is independent of ACA. Whatever the statute’s constitutional fate, future policymakers should consider opt-in federalist approaches to answer fundamental but exceedingly difficult questions of health and retirement law.

Symposium On Commercial Speech And Public Health -- Introduction, Jonathan H. Adler

Health Matrix: The Journal of Law-Medicine

No abstract provided.

Reforming Health Reform: Revisiting The Process Of Governance, John D. Blum

Faculty Publications & Other Works

No abstract provided.

The Abortion Informed Consent Debate: More Light, Less Heat., Nadia N. Sawicki

Faculty Publications & Other Works

No abstract provided.

Global Access To Medicine: The Influence Of Competing Perspectives., Cynthia M. Ho

Faculty Publications & Other Works

No abstract provided.

Patent Protection Of Medical Records—Focusing On Ethical Issues, Yūsuke Satō, Jiameng Kathy Liu

Washington International Law Journal

The following is a translation of “Patent Protection of Medical Methods—Focusing on Ethical Issues,” an article written by Professor Yūsuke Satō in the June 2007 issue of the Japanese periodical Annual of Industrial Property Law. In Japan, despite the lack of an explicit statutory prohibition, methods of medical treatment have never been patentable. The Japan Patent Office (“JPO”) has rejected patenting medical processes on ethical grounds, interpreting that they do not fulfill the statutory requirement of “industrial applicability” in the main sentence of Article 29, Section 1 of the Patent Act, and courts have been confirming this practice. In light …