By Katie Booth The New York Times recently reported that the switch to Electronic Health Records (“EHRs”) may be contributing to rising Medicare costs. The Times described two hospitals where the portion of patients billed at the highest reimbursement rate rose by over 40% when the hospitals adopted EHRs. The Times also reported that in…
By Nadia N. Sawicki Litigation challenging the PPACA contraception mandate continues, and last week’s decision by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri in O’Brien v. HHS brings the total number of decisions on the merits to two (three cases – Nebraska v. Sebelius, Wheaton College v. Sebelius, and Belmont Abbey v….
By Abby Moncrieff First, an uncontroversial statement: Despite academics’ resistance, libertarian arguments played a huge role in the Supreme Court’s Obamacare decision. That seems obvious. Chief Justice Roberts and the four dissenters based their Commerce Clause analyses largely on notions of individual freedom, asserting that the federal government should not be allowed to force individuals…
By Holly Fernandez Lynch Our friends over at the New England Journal of Medicine just alerted us to a new perspectives piece addressing the impact of cutting family planning funds in Texas (the piece was also picked up by Politico). The authors interviewed 56 leaders of organizations throughout the state that provided reproductive health services using…
By Wendy Parmet It’s easy to see the value of including scientists in public health law research teams; most public health lawyers lack the training to conduct rigorous empirical research. It may be harder to see the need for adding lawyers to the research team, but their presence is no less critical. Sometimes scientists have…
By Holly Fernandez Lynch Related to the conversations we’ve been having lately on conscience, I wanted to point you to a relatively new book on the topic by Mark Wicclair: Conscientious Objection in Health Care: An Ethical Analysis, Cambridge University Press, 2011. From Amazon: “Historically associated with military service, conscientious objection has become a significant phenomenon…
Today’s the day! 12:00-1:30pm Austin Hall, Classroom 111 Harvard Law School Please join us for a special off-the-record debate on American health care reform, moderated by the Petrie-Flom Center’s Founding Faculty Director, Einer Elhauge. John McDonough, official surrogate of the Obama campaign and director of the Center for Public Health Leadership at the Harvard School of Public Health,…
By Erin Talati In my last post, I puzzled over the boundaries of the state’s right to step in to protect the interests of children over the religious wishes of their parents, prompted by the question of whether it would be appropriate to prophylactically transfuse the child of a Jehovah’s Witness in order to minimize…
By Michele Goodwin In recent months, women’s reproduction has been in the spotlight. A few weeks ago, the Republican Party adopted an anti-abortion platform calling for a constitutional amendment outlawing abortion and making no exception for victims in cases of incest, rape, or to save the woman’s life. Ironically, some of the very same party…
By I. Glenn Cohen This blog post was prompted by discussions with Frances Kamm, Jonathan Wolff, and others after a great presentation Jonathan gave on the Valuation of Life and Health in Government Policies. To return to an issue I have discussed briefly in other work, the question is how we should count very small gains…
