Day: January 23, 2015

Are Egg Donors like Miners and Boxers?

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By Dov Fox

The U.S. tax court has just issued its long-awaited decision in Perez v. Commissioner, 144 T.C. No. 4 (Jan. 22, 2015). (Hat tip to Richard Carpenter, who represented Perez.) The case decided whether the $20,000 a woman called Nichelle Perez received to provide her eggs is, for IRS purposes, taxable income, or, instead, recovery for physical damages, which would make that payment tax-free. An introduction to this case is available in my earlier Bill of Health post: Can you be taxed for selling your eggs?, and at greater length in last year’s Taxing Eggs: A Mini Symposium, over at the Faculty Lounge. And the opinion cites thoughtful articles by Professors Kim Krawiec, Bridget Crawford, and Lisa Milot.)

The legal question presented was whether the payments Perez received are tax-exempt “damages” under Section 104 of the Internal Revenue Code. The court held they did not, and thus could be taxed. Judge Holmes observed that the contracts had characterized those payments as consideration for pain and suffering rather than the eggs themselves. He explained that “the injury here, as painful as it was to Perez, was exactly within the scope of the medical procedures to which she contractually consented.” Accordingly, “the payments were made not to compensate her for some unwanted invasion against her bodily integrity but to compensate her for services rendered.” Despite the pain and danger Perez incurred through the process of egg retrieval, Judge Holmes affirmed that “the money she received was not ‘damages'” because “she voluntarily signed a contract to be paid to endure” those risks. I’d be interested to learn whether readers find persuasive the Court’s provocative analogies to egg “donation”: Read More

Raising the King v. Burwell Stakes

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By Nicolas Terry

Today, the Washington Post ran an interview with Laurence Tribe about the King v. Burwell subsidy litigation (recall that oral arguments are scheduled for March 4). Tribe speculated that Chief Justice Roberts will once again be the swing vote, as he was in Nat’l Fed. of Independent Bus. v. Sebelius. Tribe seems to predict another pragmatic Roberts opinion (and one that might bring Justice Kennedy along), finding the subsidy provisions are at worse ambiguous and that the executive is owed deference as argued by the eminently reasonable Nick Bagley.

Even though Tribe wouldn’t label Roberts as a consequentialist, he does believe that the pragmatic Roberts would be influenced by the impact on the States, the disruption of insurance markets, and the consequences for the newly insured. If the Chief wants more data on those issues he could do no better than to consult two excellent reports from the Urban Institute. The first estimates that a declaration that the subsidies are invalid “would increase the number of uninsured in 34 states by 8.2 million people… and eliminate $28.8 billion in tax credits and cost-sharing reductions in 2016 ($340 billion over 10 years) for 9.3 million people.” Perhaps as important, the Urban Institute’s model also predicts general turmoil in private, non-group insurance markets as the young and healthy would disproportionately drop coverage, causing a predicted 35% increases in premiums.

The second and most recent brief from the Urban Institute begins to put faces on those who will suffer: “Over 60 percent of those who would become uninsured are white, non-Hispanic and over 60 percent would reside in the South. More than half of adults have a high school education or less, and 80 percent are working.”

The executive shouldn’t need such help given the ACA’s clear intent as to how the federal and state exchanges were meant to function. But, if a dose of pragmatism is required to secure a majority of the Court, the stakes couldn’t be any clearer.

Should patients be able to limit doctor access to medical records?

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by Vadim Shteyler 

The growing accessibility of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) across hospitals and practitioners raises new concerns about patient privacy. Before EHRs, patients had control over how much information they shared with each healthcare provider. Receiving patient information from other practitioners has required a signed consent form specifying the information patients are comfortable sharing (e.g., radiological studies, mental health history, sexual history, etc.). And hospitalists have been expected to request the minimal necessary information to provide good care. With growing networks and increasing compatibility across EHRs, more providers now have access to information without the patients’ express permission or even awareness.

Recent works published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine reported the results of a study that designed and recorded patient and provider experiences with a patient-controlled EHR (in which patients chose which providers could access which data in their medical records). A preliminary survey showed that, before the study, only 10 percent of patients had access to their medical records. Half of surveyed patients did not know what information their EHR contained. However, all patients wanted access to their EHRs. Meanwhile, another study reported that only one-third of physicians thought patients should have EHR access. Read More

Recommended Reading: New Empirical Analysis of False Claims Act Whistleblower Litigation

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By Kate Greenwood
[Cross-posted at Health Reform Watch]

Late last year, the Columbia Law Review published David Freeman Engstrom’s Private Enforcement’s Pathways: Lessons from Qui Tam Litigation, the fourth in a series of articles Professor Engstrom has written on the growth and evolution of qui tam litigation. (My colleague Associate Dean Kathleen Boozang wrote about the first three at Jotwell, here.) Private Enforcement’s Pathways, like the articles that precede it, brings a welcome dose of data and empirical analysis to a controversial area of the law, the debate over which has at times generated more heat than light.

Professor Engstrom’s analysis rests on a database he built containing information on the roughly 6,000 unsealed FCA cases that have concluded in a litigated judgments or settlement since 1986. In response to Freedom of Information Act requests, the Department of Justice provided information on the judicial district in which each case was filed, the date that DOJ decided whether or not to join each case, and the outcome of each case (including the amount, if any, that the government recovered and the whistleblower’s share of that recovery). DOJ also provided the date of filing for the 3,000 cases filed since 1986 that remain under seal, as well as for the 6,000 unsealed cases. From PACER, Professor Engstrom retrieved information on the parties, law firms, and individual lawyers involved in each unsealed case. Read More

Worth Reading This Week

Nicolas P. Terry Leave a comment

By Nicolas Terry