Carl Coleman on ‘The Week in Health Law’ Podcast

By Nicolas Terry and Frank Pasquale

Subscribe to TWIHL here!

Seton Hall Law Professor Carl Coleman leads our deep dive into human subjects research, the revised common rule, and the future of data and biospecimen use. We discuss the reasons for the continued delays of the revised common rule, and debate some of its merits. We also add some comparative perspective as we explore researchers’ objections to aspects of both the original and revised rules. Carl has previously written on “rationalizing risk assessment” in research, and brings a wealth of experience to the discussion.

Carl has served as Bioethics and Law Adviser at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland, where he was one of the primary authors of the report, Ethical Considerations in Developing a Public Health Response to Pandemic Influenza. He has contributed to WHO reports on capacity building for research ethics committees, ethical issues in tuberculosis prevention, care, and control, research ethics in epidemic response efforts, standards and operational guidance for research ethics committees, and key issues in global health ethics. From 2010-2013, Carl was a member of the Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections (SACHRP), which is charged with providing expert advice to the Office for Human Research Protections of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

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 Apple Podcasts, listen at Stitcher Radio Tunein, or 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.

Crimes of Passion: New Neuroscience vs. Old Doctrine

Crimes of Passion: New Neuroscience vs. Old Doctrine
February 14, 2018 12:00 PM
Wasserstein Hall, Milstein West (2019)
Harvard Law School, Cambridge, MA

On Valentine’s Day we celebrate love. But the criminal law often sees love and passion turned into violence. How does this happen? And how should law respond? Many doctrines, most notably the “heat of passion” defense – which historically has been used disproportionately to excuse the crimes of men against women – rely on a distinction between defendants who acted “emotionally” instead of “rationally.” But modern neuroscience has debunked the idea that reason and emotion are two entirely different mental states. This panel will explore how law should respond to this neuroscientific challenge to long-held doctrine.

Panelists:

  • Lisa Feldman-Barrett, PhD, University Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Director of the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory at Northeastern University; Research Scientist, Department of Psychiatry, Northeastern University; Research Neuroscientist, Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital; Lecturer in Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School; Faculty Affiliate, the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior, Massachusetts General Hospital
  • Judge Nancy Gertner (ret.), Senior Lecturer on Law, Harvard Law School and Managing Director, Center for Law, Brain & Behavior, Massachusetts General Hospital
  • Moderator: Francis X. Shen, PhD, JD, Senior Fellow in Law and Applied Neuroscience, the Petrie-Flom Center in Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School and the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior at Massachusetts General Hospital; Associate Professor of Law and McKnight Land-Grant Professor, University of Minnesota Law School; Executive Director of Education and Outreach, the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Law and Neuroscience

Part of the Project on Law and Applied Neuroscience, a collaboration between the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School.

How to “Lower Drug Prices” Without Lowering Drug Prices

Yesterday, Alex Azar was sworn in as the Secretary for the Department of Health and Human Services. A key question is whether Azar will take action against high drug prices, and if so, what he will do. At his confirmation hearing, Azar stated clearly that “drug prices are too high.” And during Azar’s swearing-in ceremony, the President stated that Azar was “going to get those prescription drug prices way down.” But I’m skeptical that Secretary Azar will do much to address the problem in the near term.

To be clear, I’m skeptical for a host of reasons, none of which are necessarily reflective of Secretary Azar. Much like health care, drug pricing is complicated. HHS should (and will) worry about potential unintended consequences of drug pricing proposals, proceeding cautiously and taking concerns seriously. HHS’ ability to act may be limited without Congressional involvement, and Congress has thus far been unable to act on this issue. Other proposals may take years to develop or implement, leaving patients without relief in the interim.

As a former President of Eli Lilly, Secretary Azar understands the drug pricing system deeply. He’s absolutely right that “there’s not one action that all of a sudden fixes this.” But if Azar is under pressure to deliver drug pricing changes in the short term, I’d expect to see focus in three main areas. Here’s the problem, though: at least two of these would not necessarily lower drug prices individually or drug spending overall. They might well increase overall spending. Importantly, that may not be a bad thing (as I’ll explain). But they won’t hurt the bottom line of the drug companies the President believes are “getting away with murder,” and they may well bolster it. The third area may lower prices – but it wouldn’t be Azar’s accomplishment.

Read More

Innovation Gaps on Life Science Frontiers

Join us in wonderful Copenhagen at our CeBIL Kick-Off Conference: ”Innovation Gaps on Life Science Frontiers? From Antimicrobial Resistance & the Bad Bugs to New Uses, AI & the Black Box”. The  Conference marks the start of the Novo Nordisk Foundation’s Collaborative Research Programme in Biomedical Innovation Law which is carried out within a unique network of international core partners, including internationally renowned experts at Harvard Law School’s Petrie Flom Center, Harvard Medical School/Brigham & Women’s Hospital, University of Cambridge, University of Michigan, and UCPH’s Department of Food and Resource Economics (IFRO).

Leading international experts, including i.a. our distinguished Bill of Health colleagues Glenn Cohen, Aaron Kesselheim; Nicholson Price, and Kevin Outterson, will discuss legal, economic, societal and scientific aspects of selected Life Science areas.

Time: Monday, 5 March 2018 09:00 – 18:00 (followed by a reception in the Gobelin Hall)

Venue: The Ceremonial Hall (Festsalen), University of Copenhagen, Main Building, Frue Plads 4, DK-1168 Copenhagen K

More information on  speakers, agenda and registration is available here and here.

Extended background:

Biomedical innovation is experiencing changes of epic proportions. Rapid progress in many scientific areas, such as gene editing, pharmacogenomics, artificial intelligence and big data-driven precision medicine, has greatly advanced the promises and opportunities of the health and life sciences. Nevertheless, the total number of truly new and innovative drugs receiving market approval is unsatisfactory. At the same time, some of the more innovative therapies that actually could reach patients have become extremely expensive or ethically problematic. These new technological possibilities raise many complex scientific, legal and ethical issues affecting many stakeholders, such as medical practitioners, regulators, patients and the industry.

To support the in depth study of these developments, the Novo Nordisk Foundation has awarded a grant of DKK 35 million for a new Collaborative Research Programme in Biomedical Innovation Law (CeBIL). CeBIL’s overall aim is to help translate ground-breaking biomedical research into affordable and accessible therapies by scrutinizing the most significant legal challenges to biomedical innovation and public health from a holistic cross-disciplinary perspective. CeBIL is hosted by a new Centre for Advanced Studies at the University of Copenhagen’s Faculty of Law. The research is carried out within a unique network of international core partners, including internationally renowned experts at Harvard Law School, Harvard Medical School, University of Cambridge, University of Michigan, and UCPH’s Department of Food and Resource Economics (IFRO). Moreover, CeBIL will collaborate with a broad network of stakeholder organizations and international experts within law, economics, life science, medicine, sociology and pharmacy.

This Kick-Off Conference marks the start of CeBIL which opened its’ doors on January 1st, 2018. Reflecting the research projects that will be at the focus CeBIL’s research during the first 5 years, leading international experts will discuss legal, economic, societal and scientific aspects of selected life science areas and debate future challenges and opportunities.

 

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EVENT: Punishing Disease: HIV and the Criminalization of Sickness

Punishing Disease: HIV and the Criminalization of Sickness
January 29, 2018, 12:00 PM
Wasserstein Hall, Room 3007
1585 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA

Please join us for a talk with Trevor Hoppe on his book, Punishing Disease: HIV and the Criminalization of Sickness. The book examines how and why US policymakers and public health systems have adopted coercive and punitive responses to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS. It also looks at how others diseases have been punished throughout history, and cautions against the extension of criminalization to diseases such as hepatitis and meningitis.

Trevor Hoppe is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University at Albany, SUNY. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow in the Criminology, Law andSocietyDepartment at the University of California at Irvine. Hoppe’s research examines how punishment came to be a legitimate response to controlling HIV and disease more generally. In 2017, Hoppe published The War on Sex, a collection of essays co-edited with David Halperin analyzing the criminalization of sex, and Punishing Disease a monograph explaining the rise of punitive responses to HIV and other infectious diseases.

This talk is part of the Human Rights Program’s year-long speaker series examining the criminalization of human rights concerning gender, sexuality, and reproduction. It is co-sponsored by the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law, Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics, the Criminal Justice Policy Program, and the Center for Health Law Policy Innovation at Harvard Law School. 

 

Graduate Students, ACA Section 2714, and Medical Debt

Special guest post by Marissa Lawall 

Arguably the most popular provision of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), section 2714 (42 U.S.C. § 300gg-14) provides that individuals may stay on their parent’s insurance plan until they are twenty-six years of age. A 2013 Commonwealth Fund survey found 7.8 young adults gained new or better insurance through this ACA provision, and a repeat survey in 2016 found the uninsured rate for young adults, ages 19-34, dropped from 28% to 18%. On its face, it is difficult to find any harm caused by this provision. Healthy young people have insurance, despite continuing education or lack of gainful employment, and are presumably lowering costs by being in the risk pool. However, this provision can lead to unforeseen pitfalls, including medical debt, because of the way it interacts with the growing trend of increased cost sharing and narrow networks.  These trends acutely impact students in higher education, because students who study even a modest distance from their parents’ home are unlikely to have access to nearby “in-network” providers, and because students’ medical needs more often tend to come in the form of unexpected emergencies.  In this post, I will highlight my personal experience with Section 2714, as a graduate student, and explore policy and possibilities for reform.

An Emergency and a Choice: Applying Section 2714

Like many young adults, I remained on my parents’ insurance when I went to college. Specifically, I remained on my mom’s insurance because I was in law school and continue to be an advocate for the ACA program. But when my mom began a new job at a different hospital her insurance changed and so did the medical network. The only “in network” coverage was through the hospital that employed her, and that was hour and forty-five minutes away. I didn’t view this as an issue until the unexpected happened. Read More

Illness, Disability, and Dignity

By Yusuf Lenfest

Medicine is meant to heal our ailments and treat our illnesses. Our deep knowledge of the body and the numerous mechanisms that contribute or correlate to good health is considered a triumph of the medical sciences. We can now perform transplants with relative ease, offer prosthetics to those who require them, and even cure some forms of blindness. But so much of modern medicine today is built around quantitative data—family histories, success and morbidity rates, pathologization, statistical analyses—without much conscious consideration of how one understands, copes, or derives meaning from their experience. True, such data is gathered for the purposes of more accurate diagnoses and as the first defense against an illness or medical condition; but physicians are taught to concentrate on the cure, and while few would dispute that that is certainly a good thing, we also ought to keep in mind that excessive focus on a default measure of “normal” does not necessarily allow us to express the diverse ways of being in the world nor adequately account for the ways in which people embrace their conditions.

Some autistic individuals, for example, believe that autism should be accepted as a difference and not as a disorder. That the autism spectrum is precisely that—a spectrum—is important: on the one hand, statistical analysis may reveal that these individuals are in the minority versus the average population, only 1%; but on the other hand, to take a different perspective, it means merely that the characteristics of these individuals manifest in a way that is atypical with how the institution and culture of medicine classifies them. Lest we forget, medicine is part of the dynamic structure of society and social norms—in the background and the foreground—of knowledge-making, and it is imbedded in place and society, as part of the structures existing in institutions. It is not possible to consider theoretical or epistemological claims apart from practical knowledge and applied sciences. Read More

The Conduct of Clinical Trials of Treatments during Public Health Emergencies: A Health Policy and Bioethics Consortium

The Conduct of Clinical Trials of Treatments during Public Health Emergencies: A Health Policy and Bioethics Consortium
February 9, 2018, 12:00 PM
Wasserstein Hall, Room 1010
Harvard Law School, 1585 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA

In the past several years, the United States has struggled to respond to viral outbreaks, such as Ebola and Zika.  There is now an awareness of the need to rapidly develop vaccines and treatments for epidemics that can quickly spread from country to country. But questions remain as how to best conduct clinical trials and development of vaccines in the context of an epidemic or outbreak.

Join two health policy experts in examining the appropriate conduct of clinical trials during public health emergencies.

Panelists

  • Susan Ellenberg, Professor Of Biostatistics, Biostatistics And Epidemiology, the Hospital of the University Of Pennsylvania and Director, Biostatistics And Data Management Core, Penn Center For AIDS Research
  • Jason Schwartz, Assistant Professor of Public Health (Health Policy), Yale School of Public Health and Assistant Professor, Program in the History of Science and Medicine, Yale University
  • Moderator: Carmel Shachar, Executive Director, the Petrie-Flom Center, and Lecturer on Law, Harvard Law School

Lunch will be provided. This event is free and open to the public.

Learn more about the Health Policy and Bioethics Consortia.

The Health Policy and Bioethics Consortia is a monthly series that convenes two international experts from different fields or vantage points to discuss how biomedical innovation and health care delivery are affected by various ethical norms, laws, and regulations. They are organized by the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School and the Program On Regulation, Therapeutics, And Law (PORTAL) at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in collaboration with the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. Support provided by the Oswald DeN. Cammann Fund at Harvard University.

NEW EVENT (1/29)! Punishing Disease: HIV and the Criminalization of Sickness

Punishing Disease: HIV and the Criminalization of Sickness
January 29, 2018, 12:00 PM
Wasserstein Hall, Room 3007
1585 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA

Please join us for a talk with Trevor Hoppe on his book, Punishing Disease: HIV and the Criminalization of Sickness. The book examines how and why US policymakers and public health systems have adopted coercive and punitive responses to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS. It also looks at how others diseases have been punished throughout history, and cautions against the extension of criminalization to diseases such as hepatitis and meningitis.

Trevor Hoppe is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University at Albany, SUNY. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow in the Criminology, Law andSocietyDepartment at the University of California at Irvine. Hoppe’s research examines how punishment came to be a legitimate response to controlling HIV and disease more generally. In 2017, Hoppe published The War on Sex, a collection of essays co-edited with David Halperin analyzing the criminalization of sex, and Punishing Disease a monograph explaining the rise of punitive responses to HIV and other infectious diseases.

This talk is part of the Human Rights Program’s year-long speaker series examining the criminalization of human rights concerning gender, sexuality, and reproduction. It is co-sponsored by the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law, Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics, the Criminal Justice Policy Program, and the Center for Health Law Policy Innovation at Harvard Law School. 

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 and Ropes & Gray LLP.

Prenatal Testing and Human Capabilities

By Aobo Dong

According to Vardit Ravitsky’s paper on “Shifting Landscape of Prenatal Testing,” there exist two competing rationales for prenatal screenings for severe disabling conditions like Down syndrome. The “reproductive-autonomy” rationale justifies screening by invoking a woman’s individual autonomy. In contrast, the “public health rationale” justifies pre-natal screening and termination due to a Down syndrome diagnosis by invoking the costly public health expenditures that must be spent on children born with these disabilities – resembling a utilitarian calculation that minimizes pain and maximizes pleasure for society as a whole. According to Ravisky, the public health rationale creates social pressure that incentivizes women and their families to make the decision to terminate. Thus, the public health rationale is heavily pro-termination, while the individual autonomy rationale could lead women to make decisions in either way. What she proposes as a solution is to combat the public health rationale to allow women to make autonomous decisions free of social pressures, and establish a stronger “informed consent” procedure that better informs the implications of pre-natal screenings and Down syndrome so that women could make the best possible decision for themselves. This blog post will shed more light on this issue by invoking Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach to human rights.

A central feature of the capabilities approach is “adaptive preference” that measures the relative success in achieving the 10 core capabilities cross nation-states and social classes. Nussbaum is aware of the fact that “individuals vary greatly in their need for resources and in their ability to convert resources into valuable functioning.” Therefore, it is not even adequate to provide an equal amount of educational resources for one student with Down syndrome and another without any learning disability. Nussbaum would argue that the child needs something even more than a formal education, a proposal that could be much more costly than a regular education alone. She would not assume that a student with the condition must have a low self-worth; instead, she would consider the factors in the child’s social environment that may have caused such low self-esteem, and direct resources to improve the child’s own sense of worth and maximize her future potentials in living a fully human life. This is consistent with capability 7B (respect), which stresses their ability to “be treated as a dignified being whose worth is equal to that of others.” Read More