All Bill of Health bloggers and readers and friends of the Petrie-Flom Center who are attending the annual ASLME Health Law Professors Conference are invited to a cocktail reception.
We hope to see you there!
Thursday, June 5, 2014, 6:30pm
Bin 55 (restaurant), lobby level, Marriott Marquis
780 Mission St.
San Francisco
By Alex Stein
Over at the CATO blog, Roger Pilon discusses the unfolding VA fiasco that involves hospitals covering up their failures to provide acutely needed services to veterans and doctors working in a slowdown mode (as illustrated by an eight-person cardiology department that “sees as many patients in a week as a single private practice cardiologist sees in two days”). He describes this fiasco as a paradigmatic example of government failure and proposes a remedy: the government should steer away from actually providing medical care; instead, it should give veterans vouchers towards purchasing medical services on the competitive private market.
This proposal does not take into account the economies of scale and scope that the government can realize from centralizing the purchase of medical work, facilities and equipment, and from self-insuring against medical malpractice instead of buying expensive liability coverage. These economies dramatically reduce the cost of medical care and increase its affordability. Our market for medical care sets prices that many people, including veterans, cannot afford. The voucher system cannot bring those prices down. Making this system work without shortchanging veterans would therefore cost the taxpayers a fortune. Read More
By Dov Fox
The U.S. Supreme Court has not in recent years held the views of the American Psychological Association (APA) in so high regard as it did this week.
In 2012, the Court set aside the APA’s arguments for why due process requires the exclusion of eyewitness testimony obtained under suggestive circumstances that rendered it especially likely to be unreliable.
And in 2011, when the Court struck down on free speech grounds a state regulation on violent video games, it gave short shrift to the APA’s warnings about those games’ connection to violent behavior in young boys.
But in its recent death penalty decision, Florida v. Hall, the Court relied heavily on important APA insights in declaring it unconstitutional for states to set an IQ cutoff to determine whether a prisoner is eligible to receive capital punishment. Read More
By Alex Stein
During an annual mammogram screening for breast cancer, the radiologist detects a nodule in the patient’s breast. The nodule is large enough to require a biopsy, but the radiologist prefers to schedule a follow-up appointment with the patient for six months later. This appointment reveals that the nodule had grown and the radiologist refers the patient to a biopsy. The biopsy is carried out four days later by a surgeon. The surgeon determines that the nodule was malignant and diagnoses the patient with breast cancer. The patient consults two breast cancer specialists who unanimously recommend mastectomy and chemotherapy. These procedures and the ancillary treatments prove successful. They make the patient cancer free in one year. The chemotherapy caused the patient to experience hair loss, pain, nausea, headaches and fatigue, but all these symptoms are now gone as well.
The patient is happy with the result but is still upset. She believes that a timely discovery of her cancer would have given her a far less painful and less disfiguring treatment option: lumpectomy followed by radiation therapy.
Can the patient successfully sue the negligent radiologist? Read More
Earlier this month, the Drug Enforcement Administration issued notice that it would be increasing the 2014 production quota for marijuana from 21 kilograms to 650 kilograms – an almost 3000% increase. In the words of DEA spokeswoman Barbara Carreno, “That’s a lot of marijuana.” This step, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), was a necessary response to a dramatic increase in current and proposed marijuana research. Read More
Looking for new opportunities in the fields of health law, policy, and bioethics? Look no further!
This spring, we’ve added a new opportunities section to the resources on the new Petrie-Flom website. This page features opportunities in health law and bioethics including jobs, fellowships, graduate programs, seminars, calls for abstracts and submissions—and more! These opportunities are updated in real time, full posts remain active on the website until their deadline passes, and past posts are visible in our opportunities archive.
If you have opportunities that you would like to share with the Petrie-Flom community via our website and/or our biweekly e-newsletter, please contact us at petrie-flom@law.harvard.edu.
The Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School and the Food and Drug Law Institute are pleased to announce an upcoming collaborative academic symposium:
Emerging Issues and New Frontiers for FDA Regulation
Monday, October 20, 2014
Washington, DC
We are currently seeking abstracts for academic presentations/papers on the following topics: Read More
At the same time that wait times at VA hospitals have been in the news here in the U.S., a recent report has put healthcare queues in the news in Canada. Specifically, a recent report from the Fraser Institute (a research institute that I’ve seen described as “conservative” and “pro-free market“) concluded that 44,723 women in Canada died between 1993 and 2009 due to increased wait times–or 2.5% of all female deaths during that period. One week of delay was equated with 3 extra deaths per 100,000. That surprising result led to a good bit of coverage, which is how it came across my desk (thanks to a google news search). (See here, here, and here.) But I have to admit I am a little bit skeptical.
A recent spate of arrests in New York emphasizes the potentially dangerous connection between technology and sex crimes. In a landmark police bust, authorities tracked down and arrested more than seventy people in the New York City area who were trading child pornography. Among those arrested were a rabbi, police chief, nurse, architect, and nanny. Police infiltrated chat rooms where traffickers made available images of children engaged in sex acts with each other and adults.
What is the role of technology in the arrests and distribution of these images? While technology helped officers track down child pornography traffickers, the internet also facilitated the trading of those harmful, illegal images of children. On line chat rooms and other social network spaces provide for the broad-spread, easy distribution of child pornography.
Importantly, the children whose images are trafficked are re-victimized each time their images are shared, bought, and sold. The frequency at which this can occur is intensified over electronic media, opening a horrific floodgate as demonstrated in the New York arrests where thousands of obscene, pornographic images of children were collected from dozens of confiscated laptops. Clearly, solutions to this problem must necessarily emphasize examining technology’s unwelcome dark side.
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