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Health Law

Health Law Blog

Commentary on anything-- if not quite everything-- happening in the health law field, with emphasis on federal developments but including state developments (especially Texas) plus occasional digressions into family law, administrative law, constitutional law, poetry, and other things that matter.

Post Frequency: 1.3/day

Last Entry: November 04, 2020 at 14:12:52

The COVID Storm: Part 2 of The Wall Street Journal Series on What Went Wrong

Posted on August 17, 2020
The second installment in the WSJ's series -- "China?s CDC, Built to Stop Pandemics Like Covid, Stumbled When It Mattered Most" -- focuses on the breakdown, primarily in surveillance, which didn't discover the outbreak in Wuhan until it had already started to spread to the rest of the world...

New Wall Street Journal Series: The COVID Storm

Posted on August 13, 2020
The first installment was in today's paper: "A Deadly Coronavirus Was Inevitable. Why Was No One Ready?" The series is off to a pretty strong start, with some useful historical data and trends, good stuff on SARS, lessons learned from EBOLA (not caused by a coronavirus, but a highly infectious disease), and a straightforward narrative describing the international response...

Cruzan and the Right to Die -- SMU Law Review Symposium (Vol. 73, No. 1)

Posted on August 11, 2020
I'm happy to report the publication of the SMU Law Review's Symposium, "Cruzan and the 'Right to Die'" in Vol. 73, No, 1 (2020). The authors who wrote for the Symposium are the thought leaders around the country. I want to thank them for their wonderful scholarship and urge everyone reading this to check out their articles...

Can we finally put to rest the

Posted on August 11, 2020
Can we finally put to rest the certifiably false assertions by Trump and Cornyn that children are immune to or not affected by the coronavirus? Positive cases in children (under the age of 19) increased by 97,000 in the last two weeks of July alone (WaPo, 8/10/20)...

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Ed Yong (Atlantic writer) on KERA-FM's "Think"

Posted on August 11, 2020
Ed Yong, whose article in the September issue of The Atlantic I previewed in an earlier post, was recently interviewed by Krys Boyd on KERA-FM (8/11/20). Krys is a fabulous interviewer, and her one-hour session with Yong is a good example of her work...

Long-term Health Care Costs for COVID-19

Posted on August 10, 2020
Even after the critical-care hurricane passes, we are looking at COVID-19-related thunderstorms for the years ahead. We are used to thinking about the impact of COVID-19 in light of short-term effects: hospital beds, ventilators, staffing, schools and businesses, local and national economy, etc...

Determination of Brain Death/Death by Neurologic Criteria: The World Brain Death Project

Posted on August 10, 2020
Brain death/death by neurologic criteria (BD/DNC) is described in every jurisdiction in the U.S. as the irreversible cessation of all brain function, including that of the brain stem. The universal acceptance of this seemingly straightforward criterion masks an unsettling reality: "There are inconsistencies in concept, criteria, practice, and documentation of brain death/death by neurologic

Trump and Cornyn Apparently Listen to the Same Morons

Posted on August 10, 2020
This was posted to Facebook and Twitter by President Trump's campaign: a clip of an interview Trump did Wednesday with Fox News in which he said children were ?virtually immune? from the Covid-19 coronavirus. ?[Children] don?t have a problem, they just don?t have a problem,? Trump said in the video as part of an argument for why schools should reopen...

Devastating Report on the U.S. Response to the Novel Coronavirus

Posted on August 10, 2020
Ed Yong has written the definitive story on the federal (non)response to the pandemic in The Atlantic: "How the Pandemic Defeated America" (Sept. 2020 issue; updated 8/4/2020). Yong's reporting is thorough, well-sourced, and fair and balanced, including this paragraph:No one should be shocked that a liar who has made almost 20,000 false or misleading claims during his presidency would lie about

Repeal and Replace (Redux and Redux and . . . )

Posted on August 10, 2020
The Washington Post has done a good job of summarizing the litany of promises made and then-candidate and now President Trump to replace the Affordable Care Act with the new and better national health plan. By my count, he has claimed on at least four occasions that a comprehensive plan was imminent...

Have IRBs Become Compliance Bureaucracies?

Posted on August 10, 2020
Professor Sarah Babb (Sociology Professor, Boston College) has a new book -- Regulating Human Research: IRBs from Peer Review to Compliance Bureaucracy (Standford Univ. P. 2020). It is reviewed well by Edward Dove (Lecturer in Health Law and Regulation, University of Edinburgh Law School) in Jotwell -- Health Law (6/9/2020)...

COVID-19 Evictions and Health

Posted on August 06, 2020
Health Affairs has posted an excellent blog piece: "When Storms Collide: Evictions, COVID-19, And Health Equity" (08/04/2020). The good news: Forty-three states and D.C. enacted COVID-era moratoriums on foreclosures and evictions. The federal government enacted its own moratorium...

If you want to skip the explanation

Posted on December 31, 2010
If you want to skip the explanation below, just click here for access to the newest version of HealthLawBlog.Long-winded explanation:It's obviously been a while since I posted to this blog. Between directing an ethics center and maintaining a pretty heavy teaching and consulting load, the blog simply took a back seat to more pressing concerns...

Dallas Morning News' excellent series on health care costs (and other things that matter)

Posted on September 27, 2009
Hooray to the Dallas Morning News for its week-long series on health care and the systemic issues that have contributed to the crisis we are now in. Free registration may be required to view all of these articles. . . .Sun., 9/27: High prices, red tape fuel popular Dallas doctor's move to Temple Sun...

Good article in today's NY Times

Posted on March 29, 2009
Good article in today's NY Times comparing the Obama health reform plan to the Massachusetts experience, including a nifty graphic that summarizes the similarities and differences nicely.I think Obama's initial emphasis on cost-control is smart - it's by no means clear that the U...

Dallas Morning News: series on palliative care

Posted on December 18, 2008
This is quite a remarkable series of articles on end-of-life care and in particular palliative care at Baylor University Medical Center. Short of watching the amazing 6-hour documentary by Frederick Wiseman ("Near Death"), this is as close as most of us will get to the true in-hospital experience until it happens to one of us or someone we love...

WSJ backs incentives for organ donation

Posted on December 17, 2008
I know it will not come as a surprise that the house organ for American capitalism thinks a market for buying and selling human organs would produce a better system than the one we have now (100,000 patients on waiting lists, four times as many as were on lists when the current system was enacted into law in 1984), but maybe -- this time, at least -- they're right...

WSJ (gasp

Posted on December 17, 2008

Vatican issues 3rd major bioethics pronouncement in 21 years

Posted on December 12, 2008
First, it was Donum Vitae (The Gift of Life) in 1987, followed by Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life) in 1995. Now the Vatican has given us its third major pronouncement on bioethics in over 2 decades with Dignitas Personae (The Dignity of the Person), released today...

Mission vs. Money: WSJ profiles Mt. Sinai Hospital in Chicago

Posted on December 12, 2008
Interesting multi-media report in today's on-line WSJ ("Pursuing Charitable Mission Leaves a Hospital Struggling" (may require subscription)) about the financial pressures on nonprofit Mt. Sinai. Here's the video:

Cleveland Clinic addresses financial conflicts of interest head-on

Posted on December 03, 2008
Today's Times has an interesting piece on the Cleveland Clinic's new policy of publicly reporting the business relationships that any of its 1,800 staff doctors and scientists have with drug and device makers. The clinic, one of the nation?s most prominent medical research centers, is making a complete disclosure of doctors? and researchers? financial ties available on its Web site, http://

13-year-old refuses heart transplant

Posted on November 26, 2008
The story of Hannah Jones is provoking some strong reactions -- both positive and negative -- in the U.K. The 13-year-old girl has refused a heart transplant without which her doctors say she has only months to live. Hannah's reasoning: potentially lousy quality of life and the possibility that the anti-rejection medicine will trigger a relapse of the leukemia she's been treated for since she was

Larry Gostin's "Public Health Law" text in new edition

Posted on November 23, 2008
The great just got better. No public-health law library would be complete without Larry Gostin's Public Health Law -- Power, Duty, Restraint. Originally published eight years ago, PHL was always more than simply a good place to start your research: Gostin's opus had depth to match its breadth...

Health insurers agree to drop pre-existing condition exclusion

Posted on November 20, 2008
You read that right. According to an article in today's New York Times, the two big health-insurance industry associations have agreed to enroll all applicants, regardless of pre-existing condition. The catch? They will only do so if Congress requires all citizens to have health insurance...

Washington passes PAS ballot measure

Posted on November 09, 2008
The State of Washington became the second state in the U.S. to legalize physician-assisted suicide. Initiative 1000 passed 58-42, according to the Seattle Post-Intellgencer. The measure looks virtually identical to the Oregon Death With Dignity Act, which was enacted in 1997...

Interesting report from The Commonwealth

Posted on November 03, 2008
Interesting report from The Commonwealth Fund: More than two-thirds of respondents to the latest Commonwealth Fund/Modern Healthcare Health Care Opinion Leaders Survey believe the way we pay for health care in the United States must be fundamentally reformed...

Tax-exempt hospitals and "community benefit"

Posted on October 20, 2008
Excellent discusion by John Colombo over at Nonprofit Law Prof Blog, ostensibly about the recent GAO report, Nonprofit Hospitals: Variation in Standards and Guidance Limits Comparison of How Hospitals Meet Community Benefit Requirements (GAO 08-880), but also about current thinking as to whether nonprofit hospitals should be tax-exempt in the first place...

Seton Hall Law Review Symposium

Posted on October 15, 2008
Preparing for a Pharmaceutical Response to Pandemic Influenza: A Seton Hall Law Review Symposium October 23-24, 2008 Seton Hall University School of Law Newark, NJ Co-Sponsored by The Center for Health & Pharmaceutical Law and the Gibbons Institute of Law, Science & Technology at Seton Hall University School of Law Newark, New Jersey Seton Hall Law School?s Center for Health and

Pay for the best care, save money

Posted on September 27, 2008
Cary Grant is supposed to have said it's cheaper in the long run to buy the best shoes possible -- they will hold up better, last longer, look better over time than the supposedly less expensive alternative. It turns out that health care may work the same way...

Insurer to pay $225M settlement in Medicaid coverage-denial suit

Posted on August 18, 2008
The Kaiser Network has picked up on a report from Reuters that Amerigroup has settled a qui tam whistleblower suit in which it was accused of denying coverage to Medicaid beneficiaries who were pregnant or had health problems. (Under the law, Amerigroup was obligated to provide coverage for a Medicaid enrollees...

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