Petrie-Flom Interns’ Weekly Round-Up: 5/4-5/10

[Ed. Note: This will be the last intern round-up of the academic year, to resume in the Fall.  Thanks, Hyeongsu and Kathy!]

By Hyeongsu Park and Kathy Wang

Petrie-Flom Interns’ Weekly Round-Up: 4/20-4/26

By Hyeongsu Park and Kathy Wang

  • Harvard University announced on Wednesday that it would shut down its primate research center over the next two years. The facility has been cited for animal welfare violations, but the university said that it was closing the research center due to a tough economic climate.
  • After a federal judge recently ordered the Food and Drug Administration to make the morning-after pill available to women of all ages without a prescription, a New York Times article discusses a broader issue that follows: whether birth-control pills should require a doctor’s prescription. Various groups, gynecologists, and politicians are sharply divided on this issue. The author discusses procedural hurdles and safety issues around making the morning-after pills over-the-counter drugs.
  • Utah recently became the first state to explicitly permit general prisoners (not death-row inmates) to donate their organs if they die while incarcerated. The New York Times introduces discussions among various academic and health professionals regarding the law allowing prisoners to become organ donors.
  • After Colorado voters approved a measure in November legalizing small amounts of marijuana for recreational use, Colorado legislators will discuss taxes on marijuana and the plan to use the tax revenues this week. The legislators are considering excise and sales taxes on marijuana of up to 30 percent combined. The goal is to set taxes high enough to finance the administration of new laws, but not so high that customers are driven back to the black market.
  • A group of Texas optometrists is lobbying the State Legislature for more power to negotiate contracts with health insurance companies, and the measure they support could hit consumers’ wallets.
  • British antitrust authorities accused the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline of paying three rivals to delay the introduction of a generic version of antidepressant drug.
  • A Pennsylvania judge on Tuesday threw out three of seven murder charges against Dr. Kermit Gosnell, who was charged with killing viable fetuses while performing abortions.

Better Late than Never! Petrie-Flom Interns’ Weekly Round-Up: 4/06-4/19

By Hyeongsu Park and Kathy Wang

Petrie-Flom Interns’ Weekly Round-Up: 3/29-4/5

By Hyeongsu Park and Kathy Wang

Petrie-Flom Interns’ Weekly Round-Up: 3/23-3/29

By Hyeongsu Park and Kathy Wang

Petrie-Flom Interns’ Weekly Round-Up: 3/16-3/22

By Hyeongsu Park and Kathy Wang

Petrie-Flom Interns’ Weekly Round-Up: 3/09-3/15

By Hyeongsu Park and Kathy Wang

  • As individual states continue their internal political debates over state-by-state Medicaid expansion, Florida’s Senate Committee rejected the measure. However, the panel continued to debate a possible compromise that would allow the state to receive more federal funding while also encouraging citizens to seek alternative options to Medicaid.
  • An opinion piece in the New York Times called for holding generic drug manufacturers more accountable for damaging side effects. The case of Mutual Pharmaceutical Co. v. Bartlett will be argued this month in the Supreme Court. Bartlett, who experienced painful, debilitating effects from taking a generic drug manufactured by Mutual, is seeking to hold Mutual liable for its defective drug design.
  • A new UN report frames bioethics from another point of view, calling for its application as an “anti-torture” ethic. This report on torture and healthcare phrases many of the health and rights violations of torture practices as important bioethical considerations.
  • In the international sphere, the Australian state of Tasmania has taken steps to liberalize its abortion laws.
  • As debate swirls around the mandatory labeling of foods with GMO ingredients, Whole Foods has announced that it will require such labels in all its stores by 2018.
  • Pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies are expecting a litigious year, as reported by a survey of chief IP counsels working in the industry. This highlights the growing importance and conflict over the protection of patents and intellectual property in the sector.
  • Small businesses have been trying to exploit a “loophole” in the ACA requirement for small business health insurance marketplaces by offering self-insurance. This practice, more typical of large companies, allows small businesses to simply pay most of their workers’ health expenses directly.
  • Employers are protesting a fee charged by the federal health care law, which would require them to pay $63/person that they insure. This fee was intended to offset the cost of covering people with high medical bills, but opponents claim it is unfairly subsidizing individual plans.

Petrie-Flom Interns’ Weekly Round-Up: 3/2-3/8

By Hyeongsu Park and Kathy Wang

Petrie-Flom Interns’ Weekly Round-Up: 2/23-3/01

By Hyeongsu Park and Kathy Wang

  • As the federal government clambers to meet deadlines and broker deals ahead of the sequestration, Medicare remains, again, one of the more contentious issues. While Medicare spending has slowed, Democrats are resisting any further spending cuts to such entitlement programs beyond the $300 billion reduction agreed upon last year.
  • The healthcare sector has been suffering from a lack of consensus and resources, both financial and in human capital. Adding to these burdens is the federal panel on the health care work force that, two and a half years after its creation, has never met because they were never appropriated any funding. The commission was created to debate over crucial details of the health care law.
  • Despite the hullabaloo in Europe over the contamination of beef products with horse meat, the U.S.D.A. is on the verge of approving a horse-slaughter plant in New Mexico for the human consumption of equine meat.
  • Lower-income consumers have been waiting for the release of knockoff versions of highly expensive biotech drugs, but it seems that they will have to wait some more. Pharmaceutical company projects to create such “biosimilar” drugs have faltered and policy has not been clearly established as to how to proceed.

Petrie-Flom Interns’ Weekly Round-Up: 2/09-2/22

By Hyeongsu Park and Kathy Wang

  • In an unexpected reversal of policy, Florida Governor Rick Scott announced his support for a three year expansion of Medicaid in Florida. Once a critic of the federal health care proposals, Governor Scott joins a growing number of Republican officials who have swapped sides on the Medicaid expansion debate.
  • While considering the terms of health care packages, the Obama administration decided that mental health care coverage must be a component in health care insurance. This mandate was met with mixed reactions, as health insurance plans have been also split into multiple tiers offering varying degrees of services and provisions.
  • In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court reinforced the authority of the Federal Trade Commission to block hospital mergers under antitrust legislation. While hospitals have been arguing that these mergers allow for a broader provision of services, the FTC pointed out it also increases hospital leverage with insurance companies, potentially raising prices.
  • A Kentucky hospital and 11 cardiologists are facing a lawsuit backed by hundreds of individuals over the use of unnecessary, risky procedures over more than two decades of operations.
  • The FDA recently released warnings strongly advising against the use of codeine for children. Codeine had been used as pain relievers after the removal of tonsils or adenoids, but there had been a series of overdoses and deaths even when it was prescribed within an acceptable range.
  • A controversial piece of legislation pending in Texas offers the possibility of allowing doctors to place do not resuscitate (DNR) orders on their patients if the patients are deemed “medically ineffective.”
  • A recent NPR debate showcased various experts considering the question of whether we should prohibit the genetic engineering of babies, and to what extent parents’ choices could constitute genetic engineering.