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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

Pediatric DCD in the news

Posted on August 14, 2008
Today The Washington Post has an article -- Infant Transplant Procedure Ignites Debate -- that builds on yesterday's AP article about three cases in which infant hearts were harvested under a "donation after cardiac death" ("DCD") protocol, which all transplant centers are required by UNOS and HHS...

"For better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health . . . "

Posted on August 13, 2008
How to pick a life partner, 2008-style: "Let's see. . . . Good personality? Check. Kind to small animals and young children? Check. Reasonably communicative and okay with intimacy? Check. Excellent health care insurance? DOUBLE CHECK!!" That's the message in yesterday's New York Times article, Health Benefits Inspire Rush to Marry, or Divorce...

U.S. health care reform: can 8 out of 10 Americans be wrong?

Posted on August 07, 2008
The latest from The Commonwealth Fund is a report based upon a Harris Interactive survey that sought the opinions of a sample of 1,004 adults about our health care system. Here's a summary of the results: Overall, the telephone survey of a representative sample of 1,004 adults age 18 and older reveals that the health care delivery system does not serve the public well ? eight of 10 respondents

Congresswoman Slams Religious Right's Assault on Science's "Edgier" Side

Posted on August 06, 2008
Scientific American has an on-line interview with Colorado Rep. Diana DeGette, who recently published, "Sex, Science and Stem Cells: Inside the Right Wing Assault on Reason" (Congresswoman Slams Religious Right's Assault on Science's "Edgier" Side). Here's their intro: Six-term Democratic Congresswoman Diana DeGette owns a dubious distinction: She is one of the two co-authors of the bill that

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New Study Looks at Uninsurance Among Immigrants

Posted on August 06, 2008
New Study Looks at Uninsurance Among Immigrants [from today's Kaisernetwork.org's Daily Health Policy Report] Although U.S.-born residents still make up the majority of uninsured U.S. residents, the percentage of uninsured documented and undocumented immigrants is growing, according to a study released on Tuesday by the Employee Benefit Research Institute, the Kansas City Star reports...

Latest health-related reports from GAO

Posted on August 06, 2008
Electronic Health Records: DOD and VA Have Increased Their Sharing of Health Information, but More Work Remains. GAO-08-954, July 28, 2008 (43 pages). http://www.gao.gov/docdblite/details.php?rptno=GAO-08-954 Emergency Preparedness: States Are Planning for Medical Surge, but Could Benefit from Shared Guidance for Allocating Scarce Medical Resources...

Texas Attorney General: Charitable Hospital Summit

Posted on August 06, 2008
For those interested in charity care and community benefits in Texas, the Texas Attorney General is hosting a "summit" on Tuesday, September 16, in Austin. The schedule looks pretty good, if a little basic, but it's the Attorney General's office, for crying out loud, and they do have enforcement authority for Health and Safety Code chapter 311 (though it would be nice to know whether the speakers

What it means to be uninsured in America

Posted on August 05, 2008
The New York Times has an article (Millions With Chronic Disease Get Little to No Treatment) today about the most recent Annals of Internal Medicine survey (abstract) of just exactly what health care services the uninsured with chronic conditions aren't getting...

All hospitals have to pull their weight on uncompensated care

Posted on July 27, 2008
Tim Walters filed this op-ed piece Saturday in the Cleveland Plain Dealer: All hospitals have to pull their weight on uncompensated care. Seems MetroHealth, the nationally recognized public hospital in town, is in perilous financial condition. It is the largest provider of uncompensated health care in the state of Ohio, and if it goes under, Walters wonders what will happen to indigent patients

5th Circuit's decision in Poliner is out

Posted on July 23, 2008
Total win for Presbyterian/THR/ medical-staff docs. HCQIA immunity for money damages held to apply to emergency suspension decisions during the fact-investigation phase of the peer-review process. Judge Higginbotham's opinion for a unanimous panel is here...

Trying to Save by Increasing Doctors? Fees

Posted on July 21, 2008
Trying to Save by Increasing Doctors? Fees That's the headline in this morning's New York Times' story about health plans (including Medicare) that are going to try to gin up some extra compensation for primary and preventve care in the hope that it will reduce more costly acute care down the road...

Making Malpractice a Criminal Matter

Posted on July 17, 2008
The Wall Street Journal's Law Blog has an entry today on a criminal case brought against a physician at the Harvard School of Public Health. The case is described a little more fully in the Boston Globe. According to the Globe story, the physician -- Dr...

The vaccine-autism debate: a lecture

Posted on June 15, 2008
From Mary Holland at NYU comes notice of this lecture: THE VACCINE-AUTISM DEBATE:WHY WON'T IT GO AWAY? David Kirby, AuthorEvidence of Harm - Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic: A Medical Controversy Thursday, June 26, 20086:30 - 9:00 PM NYU School of Law 40 Washington Square South,Vanderbilt Hall, Room 204 RSVP REQUIRED: kirbylecture@gmail...

Med mal premiums in Mass., 1975-2005

Posted on May 31, 2008
Marc Rodwin, one of the most innovative and consistently interesting health law scholars around, has published (with others) in the May/June issue of Health Affairs a very useful study of med mal premiums in Massachusetts (described as "a high-risk state") over the 30-year period of 1975-2005...

American College of Physicians: E-Health Recommendations

Posted on May 31, 2008
The ACP's new report, E-Health and Its Impact on Medical Practice, is presented on their news page. The challenge of moving physicians to electronic health records is daunting. This is from the press release: Health care may be the fastest growing industry, but it has been slow to adopt the use of technology...

Two Versions of End-of-Life Care

Posted on May 31, 2008
The New York Times had an interesting article Friday (In New York City, Two Versions of End-of-Life Care) on variations in end-of-life care -- not the usual comparison of EOL expenditures between geographically disparate locations, but this time between well-off private hospitals and public facilities a couple of miles apart within the same city...

Cash Before Chemo

Posted on April 29, 2008
The Wall Street Journal ran a chilling Page One story yesterday: Cash Before Chemo: Hospitals Get Tough (link may require paid subscription). Here's a little video teaser: Once again, it's all too easy in the U.S. system to find yourself underinsured for a serious illness, and when you're underinsured, you might as well be uninsured.

PBS Frontline: "Sick Around the World"

Posted on April 13, 2008
This Tuesday, "Frontline" takes a look at the U.S. health care system by comparing what we have against other countries who manage to provide better access and produce better outcomes at a lower cost. Here are three preview clips: Here's the press release on the program: FRONTLINE presents SICK AROUND THE WORLD Tuesday, April 15, 2008, at 9 P...

Some basic health-reform lessons

Posted on April 11, 2008
Paul Krugman's excellent op-ed yesterday -- Health Care Horror Stories - New York Times -- ought to be required reading across the country. There is plenty to debate about how to fix our health care system, and he's made it clear in past columns that he favors Hillary's universal-coverage-now over Obama's phased-in plan...

More medical records abuses

Posted on April 10, 2008
It seems that UCLA Medical Center had a serial HIPAA violator on its payroll (until he or she was fired last year for checking out Britney Spears' medical record). See: More UCLA records abuses - Los Angeles Times. We knew this was wrong even before HIPAA, didn't we?

Law review call for papers: "Preparing for a phamaceutical Response to Pandemic Influenza"

Posted on March 18, 2008
Seton Hall Law Review Symposium Preparing for a Pharmaceutical Response to Pandemic Influenza Co-sponsored by the Health Law & Policy Program?s Center for Health & Pharmaceutical Law and the Gibbons Institute of Law, Science & Technology October 23-24, 2008 Seton Hall Law School Newark, NJ Call for Papers Seton Hall Law School?s Center for Health and Pharmaceutical Law and the Seton Hall

In my Law, Literature and Medicine

Posted on March 06, 2008
In my Law, Literature and Medicine class, the poem "Gaudeamus Igitur" by John Stone -- eminent cardiologist and medical educator and poet-essayist par excellence -- is always a hit (you can listen to an NPR story that includes a snippet of the poem). It was written as a graduation valedictory at the Emory University School of Medicine, and it provides a wonderful review of the medical school

Are antibiotics futile for nursing home patients with advanced dementia?

Posted on March 04, 2008
Today's New York Times has a piece about a recent article in the Archives of Internal Medicine in which the authors question the use of antibiotics to treat infections in nursing home patients with advanced dementia. The study concludes: This prospective cohort study demonstrates that antimicrobial exposure among nursing home residents with advanced dementia is extensive and steadily increases

Location, location, location.

Posted on March 03, 2008
It's the punchline to an old joke, but this time it's deadly serious. According to a recent article in Pediatrics (summary; abstract here - full text here), "Black babies with very low birth weights are nearly twice as likely as their white counterparts to be born at New York City hospitals with high risk-adjusted neonatal death rates...

Donation after cardiac death and the LA story

Posted on February 27, 2008
The papers are all over yesterday's story about the prosecution of a young surgeon in Los Angeles who is accused of hastening a patient's death (or, to be less circumspect but at least as accurate about it, of killing a patient) in order to procure organs for transplant...

Organ donation, trasnplant discussed on NPR

Posted on February 24, 2008
Weekend Edition - Sunday had a very fine segment this morning on organ donation. Given what they were trying to do with this piece, there probably wasn't time to portray the personal impact of donating and receiving, convey some of the statistics about the various waiting lists, provide a brief overview of some of the evolving strategies for increasing organ yields, AND discuss some of the

Human experimentation research request

Posted on January 03, 2008
From Jim DuBois, PhD, DSc, M�der Endowed Professor, Department Chair and Center Director, Center for Health Care Ethics & Becky Volpe, Graduate Assistant, Center for Health Care Ethics: We are studying the personality and environmental factors that contribute to major ethical breaches in the areas of medical practice and research...

Medical Futility Blog

Posted on December 16, 2007
I don't know how I missed it, but here (better late than never) is a link to Prof. Thad Pope's estimable Medical Futility Blog, which does a nice job of tracking legal developments and the on-going political and scholarly debate over what to do (if anything) about claims for "futile" treatment.

Health reform: the time for happy chatter is over

Posted on December 16, 2007
Robert Samuelson -- Newsweek columnist and Washington Post op-editorialist -- had a typically fine piece in last Thursday's Post. Here's the nub of his argument: We're told that the uninsured are our biggest health-care problem, but they aren't. Runaway health spending is...

ACP publishes advance copy of major health reform policy statement

Posted on December 04, 2007
Intending to be a major player in the 2008 debate over health reform and universal coverage, the American College of Physicians has posted an advance copy of an article that will appear in its January 1, 2008, issue of Annals of Internal Medicine: "Achieving a High-Performance Health Care System with Universal Access: What the United States Can Learn from Other Countries...

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