Month: September 2018

mouse eating cheese

Stopping Nibbles around the ACA: Advocacy Organizations File Suit

Carmel Shachar Leave a comment

Once it became clear that Congress did not have the appetite to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the Trump administration has pursued a strategy of “nibbling” around the edges of the ACA through regulations and rule making.

One of these nibbles included an expansion of short-term limited duration insurance (STLDI) plans, insurance schemes which a group of representatives called “junk plans” in an open letter to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners last month and which California may soon ban altogether by the end of September.

Recently, several organizations, including the Association for Community Affiliated Plans (ACAP), National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), Mental Health America, American Psychiatric Association (APA), AIDS United, National Partnership for Women & Families, and Little Lobbyists, filed a suit to block the implementation of STLDI plan expansion and mitigate the impact it will have on the health insurance marketplaces.

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Health Law Scholar Citation Rankings: A Better Picture This Year

Scott Burris Leave a comment

By Scott Burris

Glenn and Mark have done their bit for benchmarking our field with another round of health law professor rankings. It is a largely thankless task, so thank you professors.  Last year, I responded to their list with the observation that any count based on law review publication alone was problematic in assessing the contributions of those in our field whose scholarship is primarily empirical or aimed at the health world.  I offered a suggestive “top scholars list” based on Google Scholar profiles.  Using Google Scholar, which captures articles in all fields, plus books and gray literature, brought a number of different names into the top 20.  Since Google Scholar depends on individuals to create and clean their profiles, my list missed a lot of top scholars without profiles (I am talking about you, Michelle Mello and George Annas,  etc. etc.), but it was enough to suggest that some very productive and much-cited scholars were missed in the Hall-Cohen list.

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Patient Safety in Mental Health Care

John Tingle Leave a comment

By John Tingle

Mental health care is a high government NHS priority. There is a real drive to rob this care area of its Cinderella image. Mental health care should not now be seen as the poor relation of acute physical care in terms of resource allocation as it has been seen in the past. However, a recent report by the Health and Social Care Regulator of England, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) seems to push this care area back into the Cinderella limelight again with the finding that sexual incidents appear commonplace on mental health wards in the NHS. The CQC is a very important health and social care regulator in England and it produces excellent reports on health care quality and patient safety. The organisation makes sure health, social care services provide people with safe, effective, compassionate, high-quality care, and they encourage care services to improve.

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23 and me boxes

You Received Genetic Test Results from Direct to Consumer Companies or from Research – Will Your Doctor Be Happy to See You?

Genetics in Medicine Leave a comment

By Ellen W. Clayton

You recently responded to a TV advertisement by a direct to consumer (DTC) genetic testing company because you wanted to find more of your relatives. The company also offered to send you your genomic data.  Although not what you originally had in mind, you decided to send the data to another DTC company for interpretation to learn more about your health. Unfortunately, you were told that you are at risk for a condition you had never heard of.  Even though the company sent some educational information, you quickly decided to call your doctor for more information and to start prevention or treatment.

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Most-Cited Health Law Scholars in WestLaw, 2013-2017

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Mark A. Hall and I. Glenn Cohen

This post updates the ranking of health law scholars we posted last year (using 2010-2014 data), based on the latest law faculty citation analysis done by Greg Sisk (which covers 2013-2017). As before, we are following the steps Brian Leiter uses to compile “most-cited” rankings of tenured law faculty in a number of other subject areas.

Health law (as many people conceive it) is a broad field that includes bioethics, biotechnology, medical malpractice, health care finance and regulation, health policy, and public health.  Therefore, to supplement the Sisk data, we include health law scholars beyond those based at law schools.

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Most-Cited Health Law Scholars in Web of Science, 2013-2017

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By I. Glenn Cohen, Mark A. Hall, David M. Studdert

This is a companion post to Most-Cited Health Law Scholars in WestLaw, 2013-2017. As noted there, health law is a broad and fundamentally interdisciplinary field that spans bioethics, biotechnology, medical malpractice, health care finance and regulation, health policy, and public health.  The Westlaw citation search partially accounted for this breadth by including leading health law scholars in schools of public health and medicine.  However, two major limitations remain—both especially important in our field—which prompted this additional citation analysis.

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Don’t miss today’s Health Law Workshop with Matthew Lawrence

Jennifer Minnich Leave a comment

Matthew J. B. Lawrence is Assistant Professor of Law at Penn State Dickinson Law. From 2013 to 2015 he was an Academic Fellow at the Petrie-Flom Center, where his research focused on civil procedure, health law, and administrative law. His scholarship has been published in the New York University Law Review, the University of Cincinnati Law Review, the Fordham Law Review, and the Indiana Law Journal. During his fellowship Matt also designed and taught a class at Harvard Law School entitled “Law and Medicine: The Affordable Care Act,” and spoke widely at conferences and events on health law issues.

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Monthly Round-Up of What to Read on Pharma Law and Policy

Ameet Sarpatwari Leave a comment

By Ameet Sarpatwari, Michael S. Sinha, and Aaron S. Kesselheim

Each month, members of the Program On Regulation, Therapeutics, And Law (PORTAL) review the peer-reviewed medical literature to identify interesting empirical studies, policy analyses, and editorials on health law and policy issues relevant to current or potential future work in the Division.

Below are the abstracts/summaries for papers identified from the month of August. The selections feature topics ranging from promoting patient interests in implementing the federal right to try act; to the percentage of US patients with cancer who benefit from genome-driven oncology, to Medicare spending on brand-name combination medications and their generic constituents. A full posting of abstracts/summaries of these articles may be found on our website.

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waiting in line

A status update on the Medicaid work requirement landscape

Alexandra Slessarev Leave a comment

Earlier this week, Michigan submitted a proposal to the Trump administration requesting approval to impose work requirements on Medicaid expansion beneficiaries. Michigan’s proposal was submitted through the Medicaid Act’s section 1115 waiver program, which allows states to introduce experimental projects that “further the objectives” of the Act. (For a more in-depth discussion of the function of section 1115 waivers in the Medicaid scheme, see Carmel Shachar’s Bill of Health post from earlier this summer.)

Work requirement waivers garnered a rush of attention after the Trump administration issued guidance indicating that it would begin approving such requests. Michigan is now one of twelve states that have submitted a work requirement proposal, with four of those states having successfully received approval from HHS.

This recent development in Michigan provides an opportunity to take stock of the Medicaid work requirement landscape since the Trump administration began approving the waivers. Read More