Health Law and Policy Commons^™

Nursing The Primary Care Shortage Back To Health: How Expanding Nurse Practitioner Autonomy Can Safely And Economically Meet The Growing Demand For Basic Health Care , Michael B. Zand

Journal of Law and Health

This article first discusses the history and educational requirements of the Nurse Practitioner profession. It then discusses the policy reasons why Nurse Practitioners should, and do, play an important role in the country's health care delivery system. The core of the article deals with the legal issues surrounding the NP's scope of practice including the need for collaborative agreements with physicians, authority to prescribe drugs, and identification. Finally the article discusses how NPs fit into the health insurance scheme and their liability for malpractice.

Food-Borne Ultimatum: Proposing Federal Legislation To Create Humane Living Conditions For Animals Raised For Food In Order To Improve Human Health, The, Lynn M. Boris

Journal of Law and Health

In order to reduce the large number of human health risks associated with reckless farming practices, Congress must enact federal legislation that requires humane living conditions for farm animals and declares a moratorium on the routine use of unnecessary antibiotics. Part II of this Note will briefly review traditional farming and animal husbandry practices and examine the shift to the modern practices used by producers of animal products today. Part II will also present several farming practices utilized today that are particularly dangerous to human health. Part III of this Note will explore the immense human suffering that is occurring …

A Capital Gains Anomaly: Commissioner V. Banks And The Proceeds From Lawsuits., Stephen T. Black, Katherine D. Black, Michael D. Black

St. Mary's Law Journal

When a litigant receives an award of damages or agrees to a settlement of a lawsuit for which the litigant and her attorney have agreed to a contingent fee, a portion of those damages or the settlement is paid to the attorney. For income tax purposes, there is a question of whether the litigant should include the portion paid to her attorney as her own income. The question is not merely academic. In a tax system that does not always allow the litigant to deduct her attorney's fees, the litigant may end up paying tax on money that she never …

Indonesia’S Refusal To Share Influenza Virus Specimens With The World: Reviving The Arguments For Justice In Influenza Pandemic Preparedness, Meena Krishnamurthy, Matthew Herder

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Indonesia’s December 2006 decision to stop sending influenza virus specimens to the World Health Organization’s Global Influenza Surveillance Network (GISN) captured international attention. At the time, the H5N1 subtype of influenza A virus was predicted to be the basis for the next pandemic. While many accused Indonesia - the country most afflicted by the virus - of putting the rest of the world in peril by withholding virus samples, Indonesia maintained that GISN was unjust for failing to ensure equitable access to vaccines developed using those samples. The H5N1 pandemic threat eventually waned, yet international negotiations to create a just …

Smoking Restrictions In Bars And Bartender Smoking In The Us, Christopher (Kitt) Carpenter, Marianne P. Bitler, Madeline Zavodny

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Objective The present work is an analysis of whether adoption of state clean indoor air laws (SCIALs) covering bars reduces the proportion of bartenders who smoke primarily by reducing smoking among people already employed as bartenders when restrictions are adopted or by changing the composition of the bartender workforce with respect to smoking behaviours.

Methods Logistic regressions were estimated for a variety of smoking outcomes, controlling for individual demographic characteristics, state economic characteristics, and state, year, and month fixed effects, using data on 1380 bartenders from the 1992–2007 Tobacco Use Supplement to the Current Population Survey combined with data on …

Implementing American Health Care Reform: The Fiduciary Imperative, Dayna Bowen Matthew

Publications

The success of health reform under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 will depend upon the sustainability of a brand new and infrastructure of entities, relationships, and procedures. So far, neither jurists, legislators, policy-makers, providers, payers, nor patients have identified an organizing paradigm to implement or regulate this vast new infrastructure. Legal scholars have been curiously absent from this policy discussion, offering little if any insight into the role law plays beyond the familiar political debates about health reform. This article draws a legal chair to the table and takes a refined look at the legal basis …

Privacy Rights And Public Families, Khiara Bridges

Faculty Scholarship

This Article is based on eighteen months of anthropological fieldwork conducted among poor, pregnant women receiving prenatal care provided by the Prenatal Care Assistance Program (“PCAP”) at a large public hospital in New York City. The Prenatal Care Assistance Program (“PCAP”) is a special program within the New York State Medicaid program that provides comprehensive prenatal care services to otherwise uninsured or underinsured women. This Article attempts to accomplish two goals. The first goal is to argue that PCAP’s compelled consultations – with social workers, health educators, nutritionists, and financial officers – function as a gross and substantial intrusion by …

Improving Antibiotic Markets For Long Term Sustainability, Aaron S. Kesselheim, Kevin Outterson

Faculty Scholarship

The world faces a worsening public health crisis: A growing number of bacteria are resistant to available antibiotics. Yet there are few new antibiotics in the development pipeline to take the place of these increasingly ineffective drugs. We review a number of proposals intended to bolster drug development, including such financial incentives for pharmaceutical manufacturers as extending the effective patent life for new antibiotics. However, such strategies directly conflict with the clear need to reduce unnecessary antibiotic prescriptions and could actually increase prescription use. As an alternative, we recommend a two-prong, “integrated” strategy based on prizes administered through the insurance …

Germ Shed Management In The United States, Kevin Outterson

Faculty Scholarship

The U.S. Medicare program reimburses only for discrete treatments of individuals with infections, but fails to pay for infection control or antibiotic stewardship more generally. By focusing solely on discrete hospitals and patients, Medicare ignores the larger epidemiological reality - that hospitals, nursing homes and other institutions operate within a germ shed. Under current Medicare rules, institutions that invest in infection control or antibiotic stewardship, may actually lose money and benefit rival firms in the market. In effect, current Medicare rules subsidize MRSA pollution. Worse yet, Medicare rules block potentially efficient Coasian contracts to promote private coordination within germ sheds.

The Human Right To Health And Hiv/Aids: South Africa And South-South Cooperation To Reframe Global Intellectual Property Principles And Promote Access To Essential Medicines, Erika George

Faculty Scholarship

The HIV/AIDS pandemic has had a devastating and disproportionate impact in countries of the Global South. The experience of an individual infected with HIV in Africa is very different than that of an individual infected with HIV in America. Life expectancy varies sharply. The ability or inability to access medicines essential for treatment accounts for much of the variance. This article examines how the rhetoric of human rights used in the context of South Africa's AIDS crisis resonated across the Global South, resulted in a powerful social movement for access to medicines, and contributed to important changes in international intellectual …

Hiv And Women: Incongruent Policies, Criminal Consequences, Aziza Ahmed

Faculty Scholarship

UN Women must take an aggressive role in the standardization of laws and policies at the global and national level where their incongruence has negative and often criminal consequences for the health and lives of women and girls. This article focuses in on three such examples: opt-out testing for HIV, criminalization of vertical transmission, and the new World Health Organization guidelines on breastfeeding.

Feminism, Power, And Sex Work In The Context Of Hiv/Aids: Consequences For Women's Health, Aziza Ahmed

Faculty Scholarship

This paper examines the involvement of feminists in approaches to sex work in the context of HIV/AIDS. The paper focuses on two moments where feminist disagreement produced results in favor of an "anti-trafficking" approach to addressing the vulnerability of sex workers in the context of HIV. The first is the UNAIDS Guidance Note on Sex Work and the second is the "anti-prostitution pledge" found in the Presidents Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. This article also examines the anti-sex work position articulated by abolitionist feminists and demonstrates the unintended consequences of the abolitionist position on women's health. By examining the actual …

Smoking And The First Amendment, Kevin Outterson

Faculty Scholarship

On June 22, 2009, President Barack Obama signed the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act into law. For the first time, Congress had given the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authority to directly regulate tobacco products, with the aim of improving public health. And indeed, effective tobacco control would be a remarkable public health achievement — and might be possible if the law is allowed to stand. But on November 7, 2011, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., issued a preliminary injunction blocking some of its key provisions as unconstitutional restrictions on commercial speech, and the battle seems likely …

A Medical Malpractice Model For Developing Countries?, Nathan Cortez

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This Article, written for the symposium "Reforming Medical Liability: Global Perspectives," evaluates the unique plight of developing countries in crafting medical liability regimes. Many developing countries struggle to maintain workable systems for adjudicating physician negligence. This is due to a variety of factors, such as widespread poverty, more pressing public health priorities that demand attention, a scarcity of physicians, immature health care systems, large informal health sectors, regulatory deficits, and weak civil societies, among others. Patients in these countries are also less able than their counterparts in well-developed countries to evaluate and challenge the care they receive and thus serve …

Embracing The New Geography Of Health Care: A Novel Way To Cover Those Left Out Of Health Reform, Nathan Cortez

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Even after landmark health reform in 2010, our health care system will not achieve universal coverage. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is expected to leave 23 million uninsured after a decade. And until several major provisions take effect in 2014, 50 million will remain uninsured. This Article argues that cross-border health insurance plans that utilize foreign medical providers are a surprisingly feasible alternative for the residually uninsured. Cross-border plans can be much less expensive than traditional, domestic-only plans. And they might appeal to immigrants and others that are neither eligible for public plans nor able to afford private …

Follow The Leader?: Maryland's Response To The New Federal Stem Cell Guidelines, Michael Ulrich

Faculty Scholarship

Billions of dollars have been spent in search of cures for diseases such as cancer, muscular dystrophy, heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s. Medical research has consistently pushed the envelope to find new ways to tackle old problems, yet, the field of embryonic stem cell research, a field that many believe could be the key to providing new and effective treatments, remains relatively underfunded due to concerns over ethical considerations. This is largely because the biggest financial backer of scientific research is the federal government, and its desire to finance embryonic stem cell research has waxed and waned over the …

The Freedom Of Health, Abigail Moncrieff

Faculty Scholarship

What would have happened if the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) really had authorized government “death panels” that would decide whether an elderly patient could get treatment? Leaving aside commerce clause and other constraints particular to Congress, would that kind of direct healthcare rationing be a constitutional exercise of governmental power in the United States? I think not. I argue here that an emergent substantive due process constraint would invalidate such an exercise; direct rationing of that kind would violate a constitutional “freedom of health” that is nascent in Supreme Court jurisprudence. Based on that logic, I argue …

Electronic Medical Records: A Prescription For Increased Medical Malpractice Liability?, Blake Carter

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

The cost and quality of health care is and most likely will continue to be one of the most important issues that the United States faces in the coming decade. Although no powerful antidote exists to cure this industry of all of its ailments, one potential suggestion to treat some of the symptoms is the introduction of electronic medical records (EMRs).

Members of the medical community, patients, and even politicians all agree that EMRs offer promising opportunities to improve the overall quality of health care. However, lost in the discussion of these opportunities, is a consideration of the potential side …

A Major Step On Medicaid, Arthur S. Leonard

Other Publications

No abstract provided.

Is Ze An American Or A Foreigner? Male Or Female? Ze's Trapped!, Annette De La Torre

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

The note argues that the legal and medical frameworks governing the treatment of transgender and transsexual immigrant detainees in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities are inadequate, leading to violations of their Eighth Amendment rights. It contends that the legal system's reliance on narrow medical definitions and outdated gender roles fails to protect these detainees from unsafe and inhumane conditions. The analysis emphasizes the need for comprehensive reforms to address housing, medical care, and staff training to ensure dignity and safety for transgender detainees.