By Wendy Netter Epstein Earlier this month, CVS announced plans to buy Aetna— one of the nation’s largest health insurers—in a $69 billion deal. Aetna and CVS pitched the deal to the public largely on the promise of controlling costs and improving efficiency in their operations, which they say will inhere to the benefit of…
By John Tingle The NHS (National Health Service) in the UK is 70 next year: it was founded on 5th July 1948 and celebrations are being planned. Clearly a lot has changed since it was founded. Our concept of wellness has changed, we go to the doctor for reasons that would never have been considered…
By Clíodhna Ní Chéileachair Last year Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) refused free vaccinations for pneumonia from Pfizer, who had offered the medicines as a corporate donation to the humanitarian organisation. The explanation MSF provided (available here) makes for an interesting, if uncomfortable read. Looming large is the lengthy history of negotiations between MSF with the…
By Timo Minssen I am happy to announce the publication of our collaborative paper with Helen Yu and Jakob Wested on “Innovation and intellectual property policies in European Research Infrastructure Consortia (part I)” in the Journal of Intellectual Property Law and Practice (Oxford University Press). Taking the European Spallation Source ERIC as an example, our paper investigates ERIC Regulations…
By Brad Segal Manuel—not his real name—was admitted to the hospital with decompensated heart failure. As a child he had scarlet fever which, left untreated, had caused the valves of his heart to calcify and stiffen. Over time, pumping against increased resistance, his heart’s contractions began to weaken until finally, they lost all synchrony and…
By Wendy S. Salkin Picture it: Tuesday, February 14, 2017. It is four o’clock and the Tsai Auditorium of the Center for Government and International Studies is packed to the gills, abuzz with energy. Harvard faculty, students, staff, and community members fill every seat, line the steps, and stand shoulder-to-shoulder in the back. They are turning…
By Brad Segal In January of this year, Cell published a study modestly titled, Interspecies Chimerism with Mammalian Pluripotent Stem Cells. It reports success bioengineering a mostly-pig partly-human embryo. One day before, Nature published a report that scientists had grown (for lack of a better word) a functioning genetically-mouse pancreas within the body of a…
Health Law Year in P/Review Featured Panel: The End of ObamaCare? Health Care Reform Under A New Administration January 23, 2017 Wasserstein Hall, Milstein West AB Harvard Law School, 1585 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA Register for this event The Fifth Annual Health Law Year in P/Review symposium will feature leading experts discussing major developments during…
By Brad Segal In my last post I characterized how overdoses from the surging opioid epidemic have become the fastest-growing cause of mortality among organ donors. In this update, I raise one potential consequence with ethical and policy implications: so-called donor-derived infections. To be clear, I focus primarily on organ recipients as deaths from drug overdose,…
By Matthew H. H. Young What will happen to the current medical malpractice system under a single-payer system? To answer this question, I started by looking at the information provided by Physicians for a National Health Program, whose mission is to replace the ACA (Affordable Care Act) with single-payer. On their website under Single-Payer FAQs, it…
