Month: November 2014

The Beginning of the Broccoli Mandate?

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By Deborah Cho

In National Federation of Independent Businesses v. Sebelius, 132 S. Ct. 2566  (2012), the Court famously struck down the “individual mandate” of the ACA under the Commerce Clause.  The Chief Justice noted that the Government’s argument for regulation under the Commerce Clause — that individuals were participating in interstate commerce by not purchasing health insurance and were thereby subject to regulation — “would justify a mandatory purchase to solve almost any problem.”  He continued, “To consider a different example in the health care market, many Americans do not eat a balanced diet.  [The] failure of that group to have a healthy diet increases health care costs, to a greater extent than the failure of the uninsured to purchase insurance . . . Under the Government’s theory, Congress could address the diet problem by ordering everyone to buy vegetables.”

This hypothetical was raised as an example of a potential absurd result of accepting the Government’s line of reasoning in this case.  It was provided as an extreme outcome to catch the reader’s attention.  Justice Ginsburg even responded to this “broccoli horrible” hypothetical by stating that the Court would have to accept a lengthy chain of inferences, something that the Court has refused to do in the past, to find that a vegetable-purchase mandate would affect health-care costs.  Some of those inferences included accepting that individuals would eat the vegetables rather than throw them away once purchased, that they would cut back on other unhealthy foods, and that the healthy diet would not be offset by an individual’s lack of exercise.  In addition to this piling of inferences, Justice Ginsburg noted that the democratic process would serve as a “formidable check” to prevent a situation such as the broccoli horrible.   Discussions about this broccoli mandate outside the courtroom were framed similarly.  One article from 2012 stated that Congress would need to be “crazy” to pass such legislation and that “absurd bills like a broccoli mandate are likely to fail other constitutional tests.”

Yet, here we are, just a couple years later, and it seems that some of the weakest and most vulnerable in our population have indeed found themselves in the midst of the broccoli horrible.  Read More

First Circuit Upholds ACA’s Medicaid Maintenance-of-Effort Provision Against Constitutional Challenge

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By Rachel Sachs

Last week, the First Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the ACA’s maintenance-of-effort provision against a constitutional challenge brought by the Maine Department of Health and Human Services. The court’s opinion has received relatively little media attention, but it should be of interest to all in the health policy space. Its post-NFIB v. Sebelius Spending Clause analysis will be relevant to scholars who are interested in King v. Burwell, challenging the grant of subsidies on health insurance exchanges run by the federal government. Its procedural posture will fascinate those who are interested in plural executive systems. And its fulsome discussion of the Medicaid program and its history will be of broader interest to health policy scholars.

States participating in Medicaid must agree to cover certain groups of people up to certain income thresholds, but states may choose to expand these groups in various ways. Relevant to this case, most states have increased the income thresholds for covering children or pregnant women through the SCHIP program (sometimes quite substantially), and some have extended SCHIP to include low-income 19- and 20-year-olds. Maine had done both, providing coverage to 19- and 20-year-olds since 1991. The ACA subsequently included a maintenance-of-effort provision (42 U.S.C. § 1396a(gg)), requiring states participating in Medicaid to maintain their eligibility standards through 2019. As such, in 2012 HHS denied Maine’s request to stop providing coverage to 19- and 20-year-olds.

Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services sought review in federal court. Maine’s executive branch was not united in this choice: the Attorney General declined to represent the state and even intervened on the side of HHS Secretary Burwell. This mirrors a phenomenon that was often observed in the context of the Medicaid expansion, in which several states whose Attorneys General joined the legal fight against the expansion in NFIB subsequently expanded anyway, as that separate power was exercised by Governors and legislatures.  Read More

College Athletic Trainers Report Being Bullied

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By Christine Baugh

A recent study indicates that college athletic trainers feel bullied on the job. The study, published in the Journal of Athletic Training, surveyed 723 collegiate athletic trainers, and found that approximately 15% of them felt that they were the victim of workplace harassment and about 20% had witnessed an instance of workplace bullying. Although there were no differences found in who was bullied, the bullies were identified as predominantly male and were most often coaches. A related examination of the perceptions of bullying in this environment, consisting of semi-structured qualitative interviews with select collegiate athletic trainers, identified structural factors associated with increased bullying and suggested workplace training as a potential solution.

The findings of these studies are in line with previous work describing the college sports medicine working environment as fraught with conflicts of interest (discussed in a previous blog post: here). However, the prevalence of bullying found in this study is actually lower than found in other studies examining bullying in other medical workplaces. That said, NCAA guidance suggests that medical professionals, including athletic trainers, should be given “unchallengeable authority” with regards to medical decision-making in the college sports medicine setting. Bullying in the college sports medicine setting occurred more frequently, according to the recent studies, when there was administrative indifference that allowed individuals who “lack respect for the athletic training professional” to act on his feelings.

Given the primary role of the athletic trainers as healthcare providers in the college sports medicine setting, it is possible that the hostility experienced in the workplace ultimately affects collegiate athlete health outcomes. Future research examining the interaction between athletic trainer workplace experience and athlete health outcomes is needed, as are interventions to ensure that athletic trainers are allowed to provide healthcare to collegiate athletes without external impediment.

Short-Term Emergency Commitment Laws Require Police to Assess Symptoms of Mental Illness

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By Leslie Allen, JD

On November 20, 2014, the Public Health Law Research program released a new 50-state dataset analyzing state law governing the short-term emergency commitment process. These laws give law enforcement officers and others the right to involuntarily admit someone into a mental health care facility if they are in danger of harming themselves or others because of a mental illness.

In 47 states, police may take a person into custody without a warrant, and may initiate an emergency psychiatric hold – essentially committing them to a mental health institution without their consent. Recently, the media has increasingly examined how the police interact with the mentally ill (for example, “Police Taught to Spot Signs of Psychiatric Crisis” from FoxNews, republishing from the  Associated Press, “Police Confront Rising Number of Mentally Ill Suspects” from The New YorkTimes, and see “Where the Police are Part of Mental-Health Care” from The Atlantic). Much of the police forces’ relationship with the mentally ill is established by the laws governing civil commitment.

Police officers serve as first responders for mental health crisis treatment by legislation in nearly every state. Read More

The Ethics of Using Placebo Controls in Ebola Clinical Trials

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[Blogger’s Note: I am very pleased to share this post by my colleague at Seton Hall Law, Carl Coleman. This post was cross-posted at Health Reform Watch.]

By Carl H. Coleman

With well over 5,000 global deaths from Ebola already reported, drug developers are working fast to begin human clinical trials of promising experimental treatments.  Earlier this month, US government officials announced plans to launch a study of multiple Ebola interventions at the NIH Clinical Center, Emory University, and the University of Nebraska.  Shortly thereafter, the international relief organization Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) announced that it would soon begin testing of three experimental interventions at its treatment centers in West Africa, in collaboration with a coalition of European partners and the World Health Organization.

As predicted in an earlier blog post, a major area of contention in these trials involves the ethical acceptability of using placebo controls.  Plans for the US study are to give some participants the experimental drugs and others placebos, with everyone receiving the best supportive care available, such as fluid replacement and medications to fight off other infections.  In the MSF trials, by contrast, none of the participants will be given placebos; instead, everyone will receive one of three different experimental interventions.

From a methodological perspective, it is easy to see why the designers of the US study have chosen to use placebos.  Placebo-controlled trials are widely considered the “gold standard” of clinical research.  Using placebos makes it possible to identify the extent to which observed outcomes in participants are the result of the experimental intervention, as opposed to factors such as access to better health care facilities, receipt of supportive care, or psychological expectations (the so-called “placebo effect”).  Read More

United States v. Nayak: The Application of Honest Services Mail and Wire Fraud to the Health Care Industry (Part II)

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By Joan H. Krause
[Cross-posted at HealthLawProf Blog]

In a prior post, I discussed the Seventh Circuit’s decision in United States v. Nayak, one of the first major “honest services” mail and wire fraud cases to arise since the Supreme Court decidedSkilling v. United States in 2010. In Skilling, the Court found clear Congressional intent to limit honest services prosecutions to “offenders who, in violation of a fiduciary duty, participated in bribery or kickback schemes.” (Skilling at 407, emphasis added) As I warned in a 2012 article, the Court’s focus on bribery and kickback activity within the context of a fiduciary duty might have wide-ranging consequences in the health care field given the nature of the physician-patient relationship.

The structure of honest services cases differs from that of more traditional forms of mail and wire fraud, which usually involve perpetrators who defraud victims of money or property. In contrast, these “intangible rights” cases eliminate the requirement that the victim suffer a financial loss to the perpetrator. Nonetheless, such fraud is actionable only when the perpetrator in fact owes a heightened duty to provide “honest services” to the victim. While Skilling grounded that duty in a fiduciary relationship, the majority offered little guidance as to which aspects of the relationship were most important. As Justice Scalia noted in his concurrence: “None of the ‘honest services’ cases . . . defined the nature and content of the fiduciary duty central to the ‘fraud’ offense. There was not even universal agreement concerning the source of the fiduciary obligation – whether it must be positive state or federal law . . . or merely general principles, such as the ‘obligations of loyalty and fidelity’ that inhere in the ‘employment relationship.’” (Skillingat 416-17)

The indeterminacy of the fiduciary requirement has particular relevance in the medical context. While the physician-patient relationship is commonly described as a fiduciary one, the characterization is far more complex than may first appear. The disparities in medical knowledge, as well as the inability of patients to access many services (such as prescription drugs) without physician involvement, give physicians a great deal of power over their patients – a characteristic fiduciary responsibility. Yet the relationship lacks other fiduciary hallmarks; the physician, for example, lacks the fiduciary’s traditional control over the beneficiary-patient’s money. Skilling offered little guidance as to which of these characteristics is most relevant to the honest services duty.  Read More

Call for Abstracts: 2015 Petrie-Flom Annual Conference – Law, Religion, and American Health Care

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Abstracts due next Monday, December 1, 2014:

SCOTUSfrontThe Petrie-Flom Center invites abstracts for its 2015 Annual Conference: “Law, Religion, and American Health Care.” The conference will be held at Harvard Law School on May 8 and 9, 2014.

This conference, and anticipated edited volume, will aim to: (1) identify the various ways in which law intersects with religion and health care in the United States; (2) understand the role of law in creating or mediating conflict between religion and health care; and (3) explore potential legal solutions to allow religion and health care to simultaneously flourish in a culturally diverse nation.

For a full conference description, including the call for abstracts and registration information, please visit our website.

The conference seeks to address the following topics. Please note that this list is not meant to be exhaustive; we hope to receive papers related to the conference’s general theme, but not specifically listed here:  Read More

“Proximate Cause” and the Patient Suicide Problem

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By Alex Stein

This difficult problem and the underlying human tragedy have recently been adjudicated by the Supreme Court of Mississippi in Truddle v. Baptist Memorial Hosp.-Desoto, Inc., — So.3d —- (Miss. 2014).

A hospital patient suffering from a number of illnesses became agitated and aggressive. He took the IV out of his arm and attempted to leave the hospital. When nurses stopped him and forced him back to his room, he hallucinated that someone was trying to rape him. Despite these psychiatric symptoms, the patient was discharged and treated as an outpatient. During his outpatient treatment, he complained to his doctor that the medications he was taking “make him crazy.” Six days after his release from the hospital and two days after his last outpatient appointment, the patient barricaded himself in his bedroom and committed suicide.  Read More

United States v. Nayak: The Application of Honest Services Mail and Wire Fraud to the Health Care Industry (Part I)

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By Joan H. Krause
[Cross-posted at HealthLawProf Blog]

Since the early 1900’s, the federal mail and wire fraud statutes have been applied to schemes to defraud victims not just of money or property, but also of “intangible rights” such as the right to the “honest services” of an employee or public servant. 18 U.S.C. §§ 1341, 1343, 1346. This expansive theory of honest services fraud has been applied to public officials and private businessmen, although only rarely to physicians or others in the health care system. In 2010, the Supreme Court used the case of former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling to impose significant limits on the reach of the honest services fraud theory. Skilling v. United States, 561 U.S. 258 (2010).Skilling itself had nothing to do with health care, arising instead from a prosecution for conspiracy, securities fraud, wire fraud, false representations to auditors, and insider trading in connection with Enron’s massive financial meltdown. Yet in rejecting Skilling’s vagueness challenge to the honest services wire fraud theory underlying his conspiracy conviction, the Court read the statute to limit honest services prosecutions to cases involving bribery and kickbacks – activities with particular salience in the health care context. In a 2012 article, I predicted that while Skilling generally was viewed as narrowing the scope of honest services fraud, the decision might have the paradoxical effect of inviting additional prosecutions in the health care industry.

While intangible rights cases date back to the early 1900’s, modern prosecutions were derailed in 1987 when the Supreme Court ruled that the mail and wire fraud statutes applied only to the deprivation of property rights. McNally v. United States, 483 U.S. 350 (1987). In response, Congress quickly enacted 18 U.S.C. § 1346 to clarify that the statutes did indeed prohibit “a scheme or artifice to deprive another of the intangible right of honest services.” The amendment did not include a definition of honest services, nor offer any other indication as to when the prohibition might apply. In his appeal, Skilling asserted that the provision was unconstitutionally vague because it failed to adequately define the prohibited behavior and granted nearly unfettered prosecutorial and judicial discretion. The Court, however, declined to overturn the statute, finding clear Congressional intent to return to the state of the law prior to McNally: a “solid core . . . involv[ing] offenders who, in violation of a fiduciary duty, participated in bribery or kickback schemes.” (Skilling at 407)

Given the prominence of kickback concerns in health care, I warned that the Court’s focus on kickbacks and bribery might well have the effect of reinvigorating the prosecution of health care intangible rights violations. And indeed on October 20, 2014, the Seventh Circuit decided one of the first major post-Skilling honest services fraud cases involving health care providers, United States v. Nayak. Read More