Category: 8th Annual Health Law Year in P/Review

U.S.-Mexico border wall in Texas near a dirt road

Targeting Health: How Anti-Immigrant Policies Threaten Our Health & Our Humanity

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By Patricia Illingworth and Wendy E. Parmet

On May 19th of last year, Carlos Gregorio Hernandez Vasquez died of the flu while being held in a cell by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in south Texas. He was just 16, a migrant from Guatemala. Hours before his death, when his fever spiked to 103, a nurse suggested that he be checked again in a few hours and taken to the emergency room if he got any worse. Instead, Carlos was moved to a cell and isolated. By morning, he was dead.

Sadly, Carlos’s substandard medical treatment was not an isolated case. Between December 2018 and May 20, 2019, five migrant children died while in federal custody. All of them were from Guatemala. Their deaths were not accidental. Rather, they died as a consequence of harsh policies that are designed to deter immigration, in part, by making life itself precarious for migrants.

Since taking office, the Trump administration has instituted a wide-ranging crackdown on immigration. A surprising number of the policies the administration has instituted as part of that crackdown relate directly or indirectly to health. For example, in addition to providing inadequate treatment to sick migrants, CBP has refused to provide flu shots to detainees, despite the fact that influenza, like other infectious diseases, can spread rapidly in overcrowded detention facilities. In dismissing a CDC recommendation to provide the vaccines, CBP cited the complexity of administering vaccines and the fact that most migrants spend less than 72 hours in its custody before being transferred to other agencies, or returned to Mexico. These explanations lack credibility given how easy it is to administer flu vaccines. Read More

People taking part in the "Lights4Liberty" protests against President Trump's planned ICE raids against immigrants and the detention centers along the southern border. The protestor is carrying a sign that reads, "Child detention camps destroy children."

Memory, Trauma, and Asylum Law: A Role for Neuroscience?

Francis X. Shen Leave a comment

This post is part of our Eighth Annual Health Law Year in P/Review symposium. You can read all of the posts in the series here. Learn more about the event and stay tuned for video of each session on the Petrie-Flom Center’s website.

By Francis X. Shen and Aldis H. Petriceks

Today hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers await their hearings. Multiple studies conducted in 2019 confirmed that the conditions of detainment are often deplorable. The federal government recently acknowledged a lack of adequate medical and mental health care at the Southern Border, and the U.S. Civil Rights Commission issued a 200-page report documenting the Human Cost of Inhumane Immigration Policies, highlighting the severe damage to child and adult mental health at the border. All the while, despite public outrage and government claims to the contrary, family separation has remained prevalent. Read More

Illustration of a family and large clipboard with items in a list checked off. All are underneath a large blue umbrella

Universal Coverage Does Not Mean Single Payer

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

This post is part of our Eighth Annual Health Law Year in P/Review symposium. You can read all of the posts in the series here. Review the conference’s full agenda and register for the event on the Petrie-Flom Center’s website.

By Joseph Antos, American Enterprise Institute

Health spending in every major developed country is substantially below that of the U.S., and measured health outcomes appear to be better. Progressives have jumped to the conclusion that adopting single-payer health care would yield a simpler system in which everyone is covered, costs are reduced, and outcomes are improved. The truth is far more complicated.

Most other countries have a mix of public and private coverage. One size does not fit all, even in Europe. The government is the predominant purchaser of medical services in Canada and the U.K. In France and Australia, the government is the primary purchase but many people purchase private supplemental coverage. The government subsidizes individually-purchased insurance in Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. Germany relies on employer coverage, akin to employer-sponsored coverage in the U.S. Read More

U.S. Patent and Trademark Office building

Laws and Facts of Patent Eligibility and Medical Diagnostics

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

This post is part of our Eighth Annual Health Law Year in P/Review symposium. You can read all of the posts in the series here. Review the conference’s full agenda and register for the event on the Petrie-Flom Center’s website.

By Jacob S. Sherkow

For this year’s Health Law Year in P/Review, I’ll be talking about § 101, that most enigmatic of laws from the patent statute. Like many other areas of intellectual property, patent law has a threshold subject matter inquiry embodied in statute—this is § 101—which reads, “Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.” But because any “competent draftsman” of patent applications could claim an invention as, say, “a process” rather merely an idea, courts have, almost since the statute’s first enactment in 1790, ignored the language of the text entirely. You should too. Instead, it has for almost all of its history, been interpreted in the following manner: “Anything under the sun made by man” is patentable subject matter, save “abstract ideas” or “natural laws, phenomena, or products.” Sure: defining what is a “natural” law is tough, but it’s not a phrase so devoid of application as to make it nonsense. (Unless you’re a complexity theorist.) Read More

Eighth Annual Health Law Year in P/Review: Looking Back & Reaching Ahead

I. Glenn Cohen Leave a comment

This post is part of our Eighth Annual Health Law Year in P/Review symposium. You can read all of the posts in the series here. Review the conference’s full agenda and register for the event on the Petrie-Flom Center’s website.

By Prof. I. Glenn Cohen and Kaitlyn Dowling

The Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics is excited to host the Eighth Annual Health Law Year in P/Review to be held at Harvard Law School December 6, 2019. This one-day conference is free and open to the public and will convene leading experts across health law policy, health sciences, technology, and ethics to discuss major developments in the field over the past year and invites them to contemplate what 2020 may hold. This year’s event will focus on developments in health information technology, the challenge of increasing health care coverage, immigration, the 2020 election, gene editing, and drug pricing, among other topic areas.

As we come to the end of another year in health law, the event will give us both a post-mortem on the biggest trends in 2019 and also some predictions on what’s to come in 2020.

Among the topics we will discuss: Read More