Tag: California

State of California flag on a flagpole.

California’s Reproductive Freedom Efforts Should Meaningfully Include People With Disabilities

Joelle Boxer 1 Comment

By Joelle Boxer

Last month, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a package of nine reproductive health care bills, following the passage of fifteen such bills in 2022. While the state should be lauded for its efforts, it has come up short. Recent legislation largely excludes up to 25% of the adult population: Californians with disabilities.

People with disabilities in the U.S. experience wide disparities in accessing reproductive health care, rooted in a long history of oppressive reproductive control. California should take action now to address these disparities and fulfil its goal of becoming a “reproductive freedom state” for all.

This article will examine recent movement on reproductive health care legislation in California, explain its failure to meet the needs of Californians with disabilities, and suggest a path forward in line with principles of disability reproductive justice.

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Construction workers wear protective face masks to prevent the spread of Covid-19.

California Supreme Court to Decide If Employers May Be Liable for ‘Take-Home’ COVID-19

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Mark A. Rothstein

Should an employer be held liable if an employee is infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the workplace and subsequently “takes it home” and infects a family member? The California Supreme Court will soon take up this question in Kuciemba v. Victory Woodworks.

The take-home liability theory was developed in the 1990s to provide a remedy for family members exposed to asbestos fibers brought home on the clothing of an employee, which later resulted in severe illness or death. Asbestos presented a unique and compelling case for recovery for a number of reasons: it is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, asbestosis and mesothelioma are diseases solely caused by asbestos exposure, an OSHA standard requires employers to provide protective clothing and changing rooms to prevent take-home exposures, and strict products liability theory may be used because asbestos is a “product.”

Notwithstanding these compelling factors for plaintiffs, the states are about evenly divided on whether they recognize lawsuits based on the take-home theory. Courts in states prohibiting such actions consider the harms unforeseeable, or determine that there is no significant relationship between the exposed family member and the employer, or rely on legislation barring take-home cases.

The California Supreme Court has adopted take home asbestos liability and the California Court of Appeals has applied this to COVID-19, but the California Supreme Court has yet to rule on this specific issue.

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Beyond Parity in Mental Health Coverage

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By Kaitlynn Milvert

Mental health “parity” laws require insurers to provide the same level of mental health benefits as they do medical or surgical benefits.

These laws have made important strides toward reducing restrictions in an area of historically limited and inconsistent coverage. But this comparative approach also creates complexities and gaps, which reveal the need to move beyond “parity” in addressing mental health coverage restrictions.

Recent state legislative developments show a way forward. These developments build on parity laws to codify baseline requirements for coverage of “medically necessary” treatment, designed to ensure that necessary coverage is not improperly denied under overly restrictive standards for evaluating mental health care claims. Read More

A volunteer loads food into the trunk of a vehicle during a drive thru food distribution by the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank at Exposition Park on Saturday, Jan. 23, 2021, in Los Angeles.

How Community Organizations and Health Departments Can Partner to Advance Health Justice

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Sarah de Guia, Rachel A. Davis, and Kiran Savage-Sangwan

Health justice is not just a cause or an idea, but the way forward for public health agencies and communities alike.

Beyond focusing attention on measurable disparities, the term health justice provides a vision for a fair future that minimizes inequities and sends a clear and urgent call to change discriminatory policies, practices, and systems. To achieve this vision, governments and other large institutions must share power with partners of all kinds to change the structural, systemic, and institutional causes of health and wealth disparities. Otherwise, these disparities will continue to keep our communities from achieving their greatest potential to live healthy, prosperous lives.

Our organizations — ChangeLab Solutions, Prevention Institute, and the California Pan-Ethnic Health Network, with support from The California Wellness Foundation and The Blue Shield of California Foundation — came together to help guide California policymakers in centering health justice in their approaches to COVID-19 response and recovery. Our work analyzing community health efforts in California during the COVID-19 pandemic underscores the necessity of collaborative partnerships in advancing health justice. Most importantly, our findings revealed the indispensable role that community-based organizations (CBOs) played in responding to community needs during this time of crisis.

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Balancing Health Care Rationing and Disability Rights in a Pandemic

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Yolanda Bustillo and Rachel Perler

Amid the present surge of the coronavirus pandemic, it is crucial that disability rights are a factor in the development of triage protocols.

During the last week of December, the CDC recorded a record of 225,269 new coronavirus cases and 118,948 total hospitalizations. Health care systems across the country have predicted that they soon may face shortages of ventilators, personal protective equipment (PPE), and other limited resources.

In Utah, for example, hospital administrators have implemented informal triage protocols that prioritize patients based on health status, clinical factors, and the time sensitivity of their needed procedures. Hospitals in California have similarly begun rationing care.

If these dire circumstances worsen, hospital systems may apply triage protocols that deviate from best practices and impermissibly discriminate against people with disabilities.

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Vaccinate Your Children (Says a Federal Judge)

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Flickr Creative Commons-Dan Hatton
Flickr Creative Commons-Dan Hatton

By Gregory M. Lipper

After nearly four years fighting about whether and when employers may exclude contraceptive coverage from employee health plans (and even block others from providing that coverage), it’s perhaps refreshing to see less controversial cases. And few healthcare-exemption cases are less controversial than those brought by parents who object to vaccinating their children. Although the challenged laws are objectively more intrusive than the contraceptive regulations—vaccination laws require parents to get the offending treatment injected into their children—courts thus far have correctly dismissed these challenges with little fanfare.

This dynamic surfaced again in a recent federal trial-court decision in California, in which the court dismissed a federal and state constitutional challenge to California legislation repealing the “personal belief exemption” to requirements that those entering schools and child-care facilities get vaccinated against diseases—including diphtheria, measles, mumps, rubella, and other dreadful ailments. The court acknowledged that eliminating the personal-belief exemption “raises principled and spirited religious and conscientious objections by genuinely caring parents and concerned citizens,” but stated that “the wisdom of the Legislature’s decision is not for this Court to decide.” Because the legislature decided to scrap the personal-belief exemption, California now exempts only those children (1) with actual medical reasons for avoiding the vaccination, (2) who are home schooled, or (3) who qualify for an Individualized Education Program under federal disabilty law. That’s a much more limited and manageable group of exemptees.

Although quite a relief for those seeking to minimize gratuitous suffering from preventable diseases, the court’s decision implicates several knotty legal issues and is worth exploring further.

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Medical Malpractice vs. General Negligence under California Law

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By Alex Stein

In its recent decision, Flores v. Presbyterian Intercommunity Hosp., 369 P.3d 229 (Ca. 2016), the California Supreme Court has sharpened the critical distinction between “medical malpractice” and general negligence.

Under California statute, a plaintiff’s ability to file a medical malpractice suit expires in one year after the accrual of the cause of action. The statute tolls this period for two additional years, provided that the plaintiff files the suit within one year after he discovers the injury or could reasonably have discovered it. Cal. Code Civ. Proc. § 340.5 (providing that suits for medical malpractice must be filed “three years after the date of injury or one year after the plaintiff discovers, or through the use of reasonable diligence should have discovered, the injury, whichever occurs first.”). For other personal injury suits, the limitations period is “two years of the date on which the challenged act or omission occurred.” Cal. Code Civ. Proc. § 335.1.

In the case at bar, the plaintiff was injured when one of the rails on her hospital bed collapsed. Read More

The Timeline Approach to Medical Malpractice Defenses

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By Alex Stein

California’s Court of Appeal has recently delivered a first-impression decision on the conditions under which a patient’s own negligence can be asserted as a defense against medical malpractice allegations. Harb v. City of Bakersfield, — Cal.Rptr.3d —- (Cal.App. 5th Dist. 2015) 2015 WL 302291.  Among the materials cited by this decision was my article, Toward a Theory of Medical Malpractice, 97 Iowa Law Review 1201 (2012). The court used my “timeline approach” to separate the patient’s pre-treatment negligence, upon which providers of substandard medical care cannot rely, from self-injurious behaviors that occur during and after treatment and that can properly mitigate – and in extreme cases, even eliminate – the legal consequences of medical malpractice. Read More

Caps, Settlements, and Chutzpah under California’s Medical Malpractice Law

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By Alex Stein

A recent California Supreme Court decision, Rashidi v. Moser, — P.3d —- (Cal. 2014), must be read by anyone interested in medical malpractice and in torts generally.

This decision involved a very serious incident of medical malpractice. A patient underwent surgery to stop severe nosebleed. His doctor ran a catheter through an artery in his leg up into his nose. Tiny particles were injected through the catheter to irreversibly block certain blood vessels. The particles, however, traveled to places other than the intended sites. As a result, when the patient awoke after the surgery he was permanently blind in one eye. He sued the doctor and the hospital for medical malpractice and the particles’ manufacturer for products liability. Subsequently, the patient settled with the particles’ manufacturer for $2,000,000 and with the hospital for another $350,000. The case went to trial against the doctor alone. Read More

Fixing California’s Tort Reform

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By Alex Stein

California’s referendum initiative to make an inflation-based adjustment to the state’s 39-years old $250,000 cap on noneconomic damages for medical malpractice moves forward. See here.

The California Medical Association (CMA) unsurprisingly opposes this initiative. According to CMA, “The $250,000 cap on non-economic damages is an effective way of limiting frivolous lawsuits.”

This is hilarious. I am yet to see a frivolous plaintiff who looks down at a $250,000 windfall. Discouraging frivolous suits by capping noneconomic compensation is as good as deterring hypochondriacs and malingerers by kicking them out of the doctor’s office after five consecutive visits. The best way to deter frivolous medical-malpractice suits is to set up a categorical rule that requires plaintiffs to file an affidavit from a qualified medical expert that verifies the complaint against the defendant physician by specifying her deviation from the medical profession’s practices and protocols. This suit-screening rule has proved most effective both in theory and as an empirical matter. Unlike many other states, California has not yet implemented it, though. Therefore, instead of trying to defend California’s unreasonable cap, CMA will do well to urge the legislature to implement this rule. Read More