February 18, 2016 - Bill of Health

By Nicolas Terry

This week we interviewed Dayna Matthew, Professor of Law at the University of Colorado Law School. Professor Matthew brings an interdisciplinary approach to the study of health law. She holds a joint appointment at the Colorado School of Public Health and is co-founder of the Colorado Health Equity Project, a medical legal partnership whose mission is to remove barriers to good health for low income clients by providing legal representation, research, and policy advocacy.

We discussed her excellent new book, Just Medicine: A Cure for Racial Inequality in American Health Care. The book discusses shocking disparities in US health care treatment and outcomes, and proposes a bold agenda for addressing them. Laws like the ACA and even the CRA (as presently written) are not capable of addressing present manifestations of bias (both inside and outside formal health care institutions). Professor Matthew develops the Biased Care Model as a core contributions to advance understanding of health and health care disparities. She also proposes concrete legislative changes, discussed on the show, to counteract biased care.

The Week in Health Law Podcast from Frank Pasquale and Nicolas Terry is a commuting-length discussion about some of the more thorny issues in Health Law & Policy. Subscribe at iTunes, listen at Stitcher Radio, Tunein and Podbean, or search for The Week in Health Law in your favorite podcast app. Show notes and more are at TWIHL.com. If you have comments, an idea for a show or a topic to discuss you can find us on twitter @nicolasterry @FrankPasquale @WeekInHealthLaw

The Limits to Consumerism in Healthcare: A lecture by Mary Anne Bobinski
March 2, 2016 12:00 PM
Wasserstein Hall, Room 1010
Harvard Law School, 1585 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA

It is often said that health care has moved from paternalism, in the form of “doctor knows best,” to consumerism, in which patients expect to be able to obtain treatment consistent with their values and preferences. This presentation will explore some of the limits to consumerism in health care, with a particular focus on circumstances where patient values or preferences conflict with provider values, professional ethics, or societal norms captured in legislation or court decisions. Considerable attention has been devoted to constraints on patient choice in areas such as abortion and end of life care. This presentation will focus more broadly on the justifications and techniques for constraining patient choice in areas such as access to assisted reproductive technologies, risky therapies, pre-exposure prophylaxis for HIV, and extreme plastic surgery. Although the discussion will focus on the U.S., selected examples from Australia, Canada, and the U.K. will also be considered.