by Leslie P. Francis Right at the end of its term, the Supreme Court evaded resolving a conflict between Idaho and the federal government about abortions in emergencies. The immediate conflict in Moyle v. United States is whether federal restrictions on Medicare funds may require hospitals to perform abortions needed to prevent significant deterioration of…
by Leslie P. Francis That’s correct: unless your prescription for misoprostol meets strict new conditions, possession of the drug is now illegal in Louisiana. In late May 2024, Louisiana governor Jeff Landry signed a bill making misoprostol and mifepristone schedule IV drugs, the most highly regulated controlled substances. Violating the law may result in…
Long COVID plaintiffs seeking disability anti-discrimination law protections have been met with suspicion and demands for evidence.
The Fifth Circuit’s black and white reasoning guts the idea of flexibility that undergirds the HIPAA security rule.
By Leslie Francis and Margaret Pabst Battin This post is part II of a two-part series on pandemic control strategies in response to COVID-19. New testing methods may allow us to avoid many of the inequities and injustices of the traditional methods of pandemic control, if we can deploy them quickly enough.
Your life and the lives of many others may depend now on isolation, quarantine, cordon sanitaire, shelter in place, or physical distancing.
By Margaret Battin, Leslie Francis, Jay Jacobson, and Charles Smith What if, instead of closing airports, shutting down trains and buses, quarantining travelers from China, and enclosing 50 million people inside the city of Wuhan and Hubei province, we had a sophisticated technology that could identify travelers who might spread an emerging infectious disease? This…
By Leslie Francis A recent unpublished decision of the Minnesota Court of Appeals brings the perils of sectoral privacy law into sharp focus: Furlow v. Madonna Summit of Byron, 2020 WL 413356 (Minn. App. 2020) (unpublished). Minnesota protects patient health records but not, apparently, photographs of patients posted on social media by health care facility…
By Leslie Francis Practice Fusion, an electronic health record (EHR) vendor, just settled with the Department of Justice to pay a $145 million fine for alleged kickbacks from an unnamed pharmaceutical company. The DOJ contended that the company had taken kickbacks in exchange for including practice alerts to encourage physicians to prescribe opioids. But paid-for prescription alerts…
By Leslie Francis Another anniversary of President Bush’s signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is coming up in late July, yet the nation remains far from offering even a semblance of equitable societal opportunity to most individuals with disabilities. For them, full social participation is dismissed as merely an idealistic dream. With its…
