Category: 2016 Election

Institutional Conscience, Individual Conscience

cnicheileachai Leave a comment

The debate over compulsory coverage for contraception rages on, with Notre Dame changing their policy on coverage for birth control again under Trump executive order allowing them to do so. The university had initially claimed that a requirement mandating them to provide contraceptive coverage was a burden on its exercise of religion, and discontinued coverage last October, before quickly reversing course after a protracted outcry from students, faculty and staff. Over 17,000 people are currently covered by the institution’s insurance plan. The university’s current position is to cut coverage for birth control that the university considers to be inconsistent with Catholic teachings; continuing coverage for ‘simple contraception’ while discontinuing coverage for contraception that ‘kills a fertilized egg’.  

The Affordable Care Act required that insurers cover the cost of contraception without any out-of-pocket costs by the claimant, with exemptions for houses of worships and closely-held for-profits, with the proviso that organisations that wished to avail of the exemption must notify the federal government, who would then contract directly with the insurer to provide unimpeded access to birth control for employees and their dependents. Under Trump administration rules, the exemption has been expanded to include non-profit organizations and for-profit companies, including public corporations, and a separate HHS rule allows similar moral objections for most institutions.

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Immigration And Health Care Under The Trump Administration

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

This new post by Wendy E. Parmet appears on the Health Affairs Blog as part of a series stemming from the Sixth Annual Health Law Year in P/Review event held at Harvard Law School on Tuesday, December 12, 2017.

Non-citizen immigrants are the canaries in the health care coal mine. Disproportionately poor, non-white, and non-English speaking, and without access to the franchise, they are among the most vulnerable groups in the United States. Consequently, they are often the first to experience the gaps, inefficiencies, and conflicts in our health care system. Meanwhile, anti-immigrant sentiment often spills into health policy debates, as was evident in 2009 when opponents of the bill that became the Affordable Care Act (ACA) focused their opposition on the erroneous claim that it would cover undocumented immigrants. It is therefore not surprising that the first year of the Trump administration, which has focused its domestic agenda on restricting immigration and repealing the ACA, has proven especially perilous for immigrants who need health care.

As a group, immigrants tend to be healthier than the native-born population. They are also far less likely to have insurance. In 2015, for example, 18 percent of lawfully present nonelderly adult immigrants, and 42 percent of undocumented immigrants were uninsured, compared to only 11 percent of United States citizens. Immigrants’ low insurance rate is partly due to the fact that they disproportionately work in sectors of the economy in which employer-sponsored insurance is uncommon. But the law also plays a significant role. Even before the Trump administration took office, immigrants faced an array of legal barriers to obtaining health insurance. Most importantly, the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PROWRA) prohibited undocumented immigrants from accessing most federally-funded insurance programs (including Medicaid, Medicare and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP)). PRWORA also barred most authorized immigrants (except refugees) from benefiting from federally-funded programs for five years after obtaining legal status. And although the ACA made it easier for many documented immigrants to gain coverage, it left PROWRA in place. The ACA also limited participation in the exchanges to immigrants who are “lawfully present,” a category that the Obama administration decided did not include the approximately 800,000 young adults who participated in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. […]

Read the full post here!

Sentinel Policy Surveillance: A New Front in Legal Epidemiology?

Scott Burris Leave a comment

Paul Erwin, Associate Editor of the American Journal of Public Health, recently wrote about the establishment of a  Sentinel Practitioner Surveillance System for Policy Change Impact,  or what might be called “sentinel policy surveillance.” The network of twelve diverse health officers will be trying to identify and share instances of harmful impact from Trump administration policies.

Erwin is suitably circumspect about what such a network can do. It is, he writes, no replacement of research, and, indeed, may be reporting perceived or feared effects as often as real ones.  I found the idea intriguing to ruminate on, though.  What follows are some scattered thoughts about the concept. I hope readers will add theirs.  Mostly I am interested in how the practice fits with general policy surveillance and public health law research.  Read More

A Quarter of the Work Force: International Medical Graduates and the Lives They Save

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By Wendy S. Salkin

On Monday, May 1, 2017, International Workers’ Day, thousands took to the streets across the United States to demonstrate in support of immigrants’ rights in the United States and against immigration policies recently rolled out by President Trump.

Among the Presidential Actions taken by President Trump during his first hundred days in office has been the issuance of his “Buy American and Hire American” Executive Order, issued just two weeks ago on April 18, 2017, in which the President states that “[i]t shall be the policy of the executive branch to buy American and hire American.” What is meant by “hire American” is detailed in section 2(b) of the Executive Order:

Hire American. In order to create higher wages and employment rates for workers in the United States, and to protect their economic interests, it shall be the policy of the executive branch to rigorously enforce and administer the laws governing entry into the United States of workers from abroad, including section 212(a)(5) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1182(a)(5)).

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What Does It Mean to Be a Just Institution?

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

[Cross-posted from the Public Health Post Blog, where it originally appeared on March 17, 2017.] 

By Lauren Taylor  

The Trump administration is prompting many of us in health services to ask new questions about if, and how, to draw lines between our personal and professional endeavors. Do we sign that petition with our institutional affiliation? Do we retweet that tweet? Do we share news of that protest on the established mailing list? As someone who studies organizational ethics, these individual-level questions soon give way to a larger set of questions about the roles and responsibilities of the institutions within which we spend so much of our professional lives. In a moment in which the role of institutions appears critically important, what does it mean to be a just institution?

Recently, local leaders have shone light on this question. Over a weekend of protests in January, Harvard Business School faculty member Ariel Dora Stern (an expert in management of innovation in health care) imagined aloud about how to prioritize her academic responsibility to a journal and her social responsibilities to her community. The tweet accrued nearly two thousand retweets and replies from fellow faculty including “Isn’t that the truth?” and “I’m in the same boat.” One response asked whether the journal had issued a formal statement against an executive order, suggesting that if it had not, Professor Stern should no longer be willing to review. Read More

Drained Swamps and Quackery: Some Thoughts on Efficacy

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By Seán Finan

“What makes drug development long and expensive is the need to prove, beyond statistical doubt, that your damn drug works”

Michael Gilman, Biotech Entrepreneur

2017 is going to be terrific. Tremendous, even. Things are going to change, big league.

7770160314_61e7536762_kThe new President has promised fantastic reforms to the drug industry. He’s going to get the big players in the pharmaceutical industry around a table and negotiate huge price reductions. Of course, he’s not going to touch their bottom line. If anything, he’s going to improve it. Innovation is being choked by over-regulation and he’s going remove burdensome FDA hurdles. But he has Executive Orders to give and walls to build, so he’s drafting in the very best people to help. We’re still waiting for those people to be officially named. Meanwhile, the media have had a month and a half of fun and speculation. The volume and variety of names being thrown around make it feel like a food fight at a Chinese buffet. One of those names is Peter Thiel.

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ACA Repeal and the End of Heroic Medicine

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By Seán Finan

Last week, I saw Dr Atul Gawande speak at Health Action 2017. Healthcare advocates and activists sat around scribbling notes and clutching at their choice of whole-food, cold-pressed, green and caffeinated morning lifelines. Gawande speaks softly, lyrically and firmly; the perfect bedside manner for healthcare advocates in these early days of the Trump presidency. He calmly announced to the congregation that the age of heroic medicine is over. Fortunately, he continued, that’s a good thing.

Gawande’s remarks echoed a piece he published in the New Yorker. He writes that for thousands of years, humans fought injury, disease and death much like the ant fights the boot. Cures were a heady mixture of quackery, tradition and hope. Survival was largely determined by luck. Medical “emergencies” did not exist; only medical “catastrophes”. However, during the last century, antibiotics and vaccines routed infection, polio and measles. X-rays, MRIs and sophisticated lab tests gave doctors a new depth of understanding. New surgical methods and practices put doctors in a cage match with Death and increasingly, doctors came out with bloody knuckles and a title belt. Gradually, doctors became heroes and miracles became the expectation and the norm. This changed the way we view healthcare. Gawande writes, “it was like discovering that water could put out fire. We built our health-care system, accordingly, to deploy firefighters.”

But the age of heroic medicine is over. Dramatic, emergency interventions are still an important part of the system. However, Gawande insists that the heavy emphasis on flashy, heroic work is misplaced. Much more important is “incremental medicine” and the role of the overworked and underappreciated primary care physician.

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Watching Out for the Rights of the Uninsured

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

Special Guest Post by Professor Howell E. Jackson, Harvard Law School

As Republicans strive to unwind the Affordable Care Act (ACA), public commentary is quite naturally focusing on the number of Americans who might lose health insurance coverage. The Congressional Budget Office last month estimated that eleven million individuals could drop off of insurance rolls immediately, with millions and millions more to lose coverage within the next few years.  These numbers are indeed troubling, but the fate of the uninsured deserves similar attention.

For those critical of the ACA, uninsured individuals are sometimes characterized as victims of government overreach: penalized with a tax assessment for not complying with the individual mandate, and denied access to the kinds of lower-cost insurance policies that a less regulated insurance market might provide.  And there is some truth to this critique:  Mandatory coverage terms under the ACA do drive up premiums, and of the estimated 27 million Americans now without health insurance coverage, some eight million are paying ACA penalties, totaling on the order of $8 billion a year.  But under the ACA, the uninsured are getting something for those penalties.  In fact, they are getting quite a lot.

As policy analysts often note, the ACA prohibits insurance companies from denying coverage or charging higher premiums based on pre-existing conditions.  This protection is most often discussed in the context of individuals seeking to obtain insurance coverage in the first instance or after losing employer-provided coverage.  A less heralded, but equally important feature of this aspect of the ACA is that it allows healthy Americans the freedom to forgo insurance in the first instance and then purchase reasonably priced coverage when the need arises.  The policies available to uninsured individuals have the full protections of the ACA, including limits on out-of-pocket expenses, as well as prohibitions on annual or lifetime coverage limits and mandated terms of coverage.  In addition, premiums are constrained and, for many individuals and families, premium assistance and cost sharing support are available.   While many despair that a large and possibly growing share of Americans lack insurance coverage, at least the ACA ensures that the uninsured have the right to buy a good health insurance policy at a reasonable price when the need arises. Read More

What is the Meaning of Trump’s Day 1 Executive Order on the ACA?

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff 2 Comments

Guest Post by Erin C. Fuse Brown

On the day of his inauguration, President Trump signed an executive order instructing the executive branch agencies to exercise their discretion and authority to  “waive, defer, grant exemptions from, or delay the implementation of” fees, taxes, or penalties under the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

The order does not specify which “fiscal burdens” it targets, but the individual mandate, the employer mandate, and the various industry and payroll taxes imposed by the law immediately jump to mind. These are all written into the law, and the President cannot unilaterally set them aside. The executive order says it is following the law, including the Administrative Procedure Act, which is good because it means the President is not instructing anyone to flout the law. Even existing ACA rules cannot be undone overnight and can only be changed or repealed through a lengthy notice-and-comment rulemaking process.

There is such a thing as “enforcement discretion,” which some suggest means that the individual mandate won’t be enforced anymore. I’m not so sure. If the President instructed the IRS to stop collecting taxes from billionaires under its enforcement discretion, that wouldn’t be legal. Read More

Housing Equity Week in Review

Temple University Center for Public Health Law Research Leave a comment

Here’s the latest in housing equity and law for the week of January 16-22, 2017:

Did we miss anything? Let us know.