A Case to Watch: Heimeshoff v. Hartford Life & Accident Ins. Co.

By Jeremy Kreisberg

A little over two weeks ago, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in a rather obscure ERISA case—Heimsehoff v. Hartford Life & Accident Ins. Co.  The case asks a rather basic question without a readily apparent answer: when a beneficiary of an ERISA-regulated insurance plan seeks to claim benefits, may the statute of limitations period for judicial review of the benefit decision begin before the completion of the plan’s mandatory internal resolution process?  In other words, can a statute of limitations for judicial review begin to run before a beneficiary is permitted to file suit?

The problem this lawsuit seeks to address can be clarified through a hypothetical: Imagine beneficiary B has an ERISA-regulated disability insurance plan with (i.e. provided by her employer but issued and administered by) insurer I.  B’s contract with I states that a three-year statute of limitations for judicial review of benefit decisions begins running at the date that B sends I proof of loss.  Then the following takes place:

  • B sends I her proof of loss on January 1, 2010.
  • I’s internal resolution process is completed on January 2, 2013, and B is denied her claim.
  • B believes the decision was erroneous and seeks to challenge it in court.
  • The court informs B that she has no claim because the statute of limitations—three years from January 1, 2010, the date that B sent I her proof of loss—has run.

B’s case certainly seems rather compelling.  After all, I has functionally denied B any opportunity to receive independent review of I’s benefit decision.  But at oral argument, the Justices raised several interesting arguments that make the outcome of this case far from clear.

Read More

11/21: Neil Flanzraich on “Responsibility and Integrity in the Pharmaceutical Industry”

Please join the Petrie-Flom Center for a lecture by Neil Flanzraich on responsible pricing strategy, access to care, clinical trial design, outsourcing, and other topics that raise thorny but crucial issues for pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.  There will be substantial time for Q&A.

Mr. Flanzraich graduated from HLS in 1968, and was appointed by Dean Martha Minow as an Expert in Residence at the Harvard Innovation Lab (i-lab) in fall 2012. He is the Executive Chairman of Kirax Corporation and the Executive Chairman of ParinGenix, Inc., both of which are privately owned biotech companies. He previously served as the Vice Chairman and President of Ivax Corporation, an international pharmaceutical company, which was sold to Teva in 2006 for an enterprise value of $10 billion.

For more information, please visit our website.

Toward an Epidemiological Definition of Community

By Nathaniel Counts

With the coordination and additional funding afforded by the National Prevention, Health Promotion, and Public Health Council and the Prevention and Public Health Fund under the Affordable Care Act, scholars may have a unique opportunity to work toward an epidemiological definition of community.  The evaluation and record-keeping components of the different interventions will inevitably lead to a great deal of additional information about individuals, including their beliefs, behaviors, and health, over time.  If one’s behaviors, and in particular the Leading Health Indicators (ten factors chosen by Health and Human Services that contribute to health, including substance abuse, exercise levels, condom use, etc.) and health status are determined in part by social signaling, it may be possible to use this data to determine which individuals seem to be part of a community.  Various environmental, and possibly even genetic, factors could be controlled for to find groups of individuals whose Leading Health Indicators affect one another’s, and whose health statuses are linked.  This grouping would be a functional “community,” a group of people who influence one another, whether they realize it or not. Currently, the notion of community is usually defined geographically – your community are those that are close to you, unless it is a city, in which case your community are those who are nearby of similar socioeconomic class.  This method would allow for greater precision in determining groups that influence another.

A more precise understanding of community would be useful for assessing the impact of interventions, public health or otherwise.  If you can see the initial community structures at the beginning of an intervention, you could target the individual communities for change and see how their Leading Health Indicators and health statuses evolve.  You could also, and more importantly, see how an intervention changes the make-up of a community.  A new basketball program in a local gymnasium will bring together different arrangements of individuals, who may in turn influence one another, joining them into a community and linking their health statuses.  This could determine choices of programs – a youth basketball league will shape communities differently than a family program or an adult program, and conscious choices could be made about how to bin people based on their current risk behaviors.  This type of information could also provide caution to those planning any sort of intervention – any interaction could reshape communities, subtly changing individual’s values and even their health in ways unbeknownst to them and unintended by the intervener.

HHIP: Friday, November 8: Peter Singer – Effective Altruism

Harvard High Impact Philanthropy presents:

Peter Singer on Effective Altruism

Effective altruism is a new movement consisting of many individuals and several independent organizations, all focused on the deceptively simple idea that we should try to do as much good as we can. The existence of this movement raises many interesting questions, both practical and philosophical, which this talk will discuss.

Friday, November 8th; 4 – 5 PM, in Science Center D

RSVP to the event

Peter Singer is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at the Princeton University Center for Human Values and Laureate Professor at the Center for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne. He is well known for his philosophical work, as well as for his books – most recently including The Life You Can Save.
This event is co-sponsored by the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School, with support from the Oswald DeN. Cammann Fund, as well as Harvard’s Departments of Economics and Philosophy.

Prof. Singer will also speak on “Ethics and Animals: Where Are We Now?” at 12 PM in Austin 200 (Ames Courtroom), 1515 Massachusetts Ave.

 

Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn highlights X-risk

By Nir Eyal

Young people often assume that their life expectancies will remain what life expectancy is today—although life expectancy will grow by the time they are old. When all of us imagine our futures, we often neglect to take account of radical technologies which were not foreseeable prior to their invention, just as the internet wasn’t, and instead imagine something closer to present realities. We do not appreciate how different the future could be.

Among other things, the future might be dangerous to humankind in ways that we fail currently to appreciate. We got lucky, and nuclear energy seems hard for individuals to develop at home, but will that last, and will new WMDs be impossible to replicate with 3D printers or other future technologies? Can anyone guarantee that viruses manufactured for scientific research will not be spread by error or terror? Can we guarantee that robots designed for contained military purposes would not go out of control? Or that once artificial intelligence is advanced enough to design other artificial intelligence, humans will remain safe for long? Some of the greatest dangers to our species are unknown, simply because the technologies that create them have not been invented yet—just as many technologies that exist and threaten us today were not invented 100 years ago.

In a multimedia presentation that drew a prolonged applause from a crowd of Harvard undergraduates, Estonian programmer Jaan Tallin wove together three stories: the story of Kazaa and Skype, which he helped start; his personal journey into studying and promoting the study of existential risk; and a “sermon” (as he put it, tongue in cheek) on the ethical responsibilities of technology developers.

Tallin proposed taking active steps in anticipation of our future errors, both to make businesses robust and to keep our species safe in an opaque future: incorporating safety margins, and continually questioning one’s assumptions. He concluded by arguing, provocatively, that indispensable to both goals is having fun.

The talk was organized by the student organization Harvard High Impact Philanthropy (HHIP).

Announcing the New Journal of Law and Biosciences

The Petrie-Flom Center and Harvard Law School are delighted to announce our partnership with Duke University, Stanford University, and Oxford University Press to launch a new peer-reviewed, open access, online journal in 2014: Journal of Law and the Biosciences (JLB).

JLB will become the preeminent outlet to publish cutting-edge scholarship wherever law and the biosciences intersect. The journal will take a broad and interdisciplinary view of these areas, publishing articles on topics generally considered part of bioethics or neuroethics, such as the ethical, legal, and social implications of reproductive technologies, genetics, stem cell research, neuroscience, or human biological enhancement.  At the same time, JLB will be a home for work that speaks directly to legal issues where the biosciences can be involved, such as food and drug regulation, biosciences patent law, scientific evidence, and criminal responsibility.

Read More