Month: June 2014

The Right to Health at the Public/Private Divide: A Global Comparative Study

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By Allison K. Hoffman

In the U.S., the right to health is often held up as a utopian legal principle that other countries manage to embrace and that we shortsightedly spurn.  What I learned working on a new project is that the right to health does not always lend itself to admirable ends.  In some countries, a formal right to health is not used to advance equity but rather for the opposite.  In other words, having a right to health can lead to a less equitable distribution of health care resources because, for example, people who are better able to navigate the legal system can claim more resources for themselves.

This insight and others are featured in an excellent book that just came out from Cambridge Press, The Right to Health at the Public/Private Divide: A Global Comparative Study, edited by Colleen M. Flood, University of Toronto, Faculty of Law and Aeyal Gross, Tel-Aviv University, Faculty of Law.  This book is worth reading, in part, because it features chapters on countries that are not the usual suspects, including Hungary, Venezuela, Nigeria, New Zealand, and Taiwan.  Two of the chapters are by U.S. health care scholars: one I wrote on the U.S. system and the Affordable Care Act (A Vision of an Emerging Right to Health Care in the United States: Expanding Health Care Equity through Legislative Reform) and one Christina Ho wrote on China (Health Rights at the Juncture between State and Market: the People’s Republic of China).

In my chapter, I argue that while the U.S. does not have a formal right to health, the ACA could provide the vision and foundation for an evolving American conception of a right to health care.

Introducing New Contributor Allison Hoffman

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14.06.05, HoffmanBill of Health is pleased to welcome Allison Hoffman as an Occasional Contributor!

Allison Hoffman is Assistant Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law.  Her work focuses on health care law and policy.  She currently teaches Health Care Law and Policy, Torts, and a seminar on Health Insurance and Reform.  Hoffman is also a Faculty Associate at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.

Allison received her A.B. summa cum laude from Dartmouth College and her law degree from Yale Law School, where she was Submissions Editor for the Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law, and Ethics.  She worked for a number of years in the health care industry.  Allison practiced health care law at Ropes & Gray, LLP, where she counseled academic medical centers, insurers, pharmaceutical companies, and private equity firms on a wide range of health care regulatory matters.  She has also provided strategic advice to health care companies and to nonprofit organizations and foundations as a management consultant at The Boston Consulting Group and The Bridgespan Group.  Immediately prior to joining the faculty at UCLA, she was an Academic Fellow at Harvard’s Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics.

Allison’s research explores the role of regulation and the welfare state in promoting health and well being.  Her current writing examines how health insurance regulation both reflects and shapes different conceptions of risk and responsibility, drawing on political science, sociology, psychology, and economics literature.

Recent Publications:

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High Noon for Population-Wide Mammography Screening?

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By Prof. Dr. med. Dr. phil. Nikola Biller-Andorno

Director, Institute of Biomedical Ethics, University of Zurich, Switzerland

Safra Network Fellow, Harvard University (13-14)

Visiting Professor, Div. Medical Ethics, Harvard Medical School (12-14)

It is amazing how much heat a report can draw that simply states what has been all over town for some time now: We do not know if mammography screening does more good than harm, we do not even know for sure if it does any good at all.

The Swiss Medical Board, an independent health technology assessment initiative that was started in 2008, stated that based on the empirical data availability the introduction of mammography screening all over Switzerland could not be recommended.

As could be expected the report drew fire. Curiously, one of the chief complaints was that it was “unethical” to upset women who might no longer know if screening was good for them or not.

This sounds just a little bit paternalistic – particularly given that we know that most women seriously overestimate the benefits of screening when making their decision, a point that my colleague Peter Juni and myself illustrate in a Perspective piece published on May 22, 2014 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

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PCAST, Big Data, and Privacy

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By Leslie Francis

Cross-post from HealthLawProf Blog

The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) has issued a report intended to be a technological complement to the recent White House report on big data. This PCAST report, however, is far more than a technological analysis—although as a description of technological developments it is wonderfully accessible, clear and informative.  It also contains policy recommendations of sweeping significance about how technology should be used and developed.  PCAST’s recommendations carry the imprimatur of scientific expertise—and lawyers interested in health policy should be alert to the normative approach of PCAST to big data.

Here, in PCAST’s own words, is the basic approach: “In light of the continuing proliferation of ways to collect and use information about people, PCAST recommends that policy focus primarily on whether specific uses of information about people affect privacy adversely. It also recommends that policy focus on outcomes, on the “what” rather than the “how,” to avoid becoming obsolete as technology advances. The policy framework should accelerate the development and commercialization of technologies that can help to contain adverse impacts on privacy, including research into new technological options. By using technology more effectively, the Nation can lead internationally in making the most of big data’s benefits while limiting the concerns it poses for privacy. Finally, PCAST calls for efforts to assure that there is enough talent available with the expertise needed to develop and use big data in a privacy-sensitive way.”  In other words:  assume the importance of continuing to collect and analyze big data, identify potential harms and fixes on a case-by-case basis possibly after the fact, and enlist the help of the commercial sector to develop profitable privacy technologies.  Read More

Art Caplan: “Was Sarah Murnaghan Treated Justly?”

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Art Caplan has coauthored a new opinion piece in the journal Pediatrics on the controversy over the case of Sarah Murnaghan, in which a federal judge ordered the Secretary of Health to place a pediatric patient on the adult transplant list to increase her chances of receiving a donor organ. From the piece:

Lung transplantation is a potentially life-saving procedure for patients with irreversible lung failure. Five-year survival rates after lung transplantation are >50% for children and young adults. But there are not enough lungs to save everyone who could benefit. In 2005, the United Network for Organ Sharing developed a scoring system to prioritize patients for transplantation. That system considered transplant urgency as well as time on the waiting list and the likelihood that the patient would benefit from the transplant. At the time, there were so few pediatric lung transplants that the data that were used to develop the Lung Allocation Score were inadequate to analyze and prioritize children, so they were left out of the Lung Allocation Score system. In 2013, the family of a 10-year-old challenged this system, claiming that it was unjust to children. In the article, we asked experts in health policy, bioethics, and transplantation to discuss the issues in the Murnaghan case.

Read the full article.

Bumps on the Road Towards Clinical Trials Data Transparency- A recent U-Turn by the EMA?

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By Timo Minssen

In a recent blog I discussed the benefits and potential draw-backs of a new “EU Regulation on clinical trials on medicinal products for human use,” which had been adopted by the European Parliament and Council in April 2014. Parallel to these legislative developments, the drug industry has responded with its own initiatives providing for varying degrees of transparency. But also medical authorities have been very active in developing their transparency policies.

In the US, the FDA proposed new rules which would require disclosure of masked and de-identified patient-level data. In the EU, the EMA organized during 2013 a series of meetings with its five advisory committees to devise a draft policy for proactive publication of and access to clinical-trial data. In June 2013 this process resulted in the publication, of a draft policy document titled “Publication and access to clinical-trial data” (EMA/240810/2013).

Following an invitation for public comments on this document, the EMA received more than 1,000 submissions from stakeholders. Based on these comments the EMA recently proposed “Terms of Use” (TOU) and “Redaction Principles” for clinical trial data disclosure.

In a letter to the EMA’s executive director Dr. Guido Rasi, dated 13 May 2014, the European Ombudsman, Emily O’Reilly, has now expressed concern about what seems to be a substantial shift of policy regarding clinical trial data transparency. Read More

Introducing New Contributor Donald Light

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Donald Light is a medical and economic sociologist who does policy research on institutional and global bioethics concerning access and quality of medical services and drugs. Recent research analyzes the epidemic of harmful side effects from drugs (The Risks of Prescription Drugs [Columbia UP, 2010]); institutional barriers to more effective, safer drugs; and global vaccine policy. Light is a founding fellow of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. From 2009-2011, he was the Lokey Visiting Professor at Stanford University, and he is a professor of comparative health policy at the Rowan University School of Osteopathic Medicine.  From 2012-2014 he is a visiting fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. Light received his BA from Stanford, his MA from the University of Chicago, and his PhD from Brandeis.

Selected Publications:

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