Gloved hand holding medical rapid test labeled COVID-19 over sheet of paper listing the test result as negative.

How COVID-19 Could Drive Improvements in Care Facilities (Part I)

By Nicolas Terry, LLM and Tara Sklar, JD, MPH

Introduction

This post is part I of a two-part series on COVID-19 and care facilities. In this first installment we assess the centrality of care facilities to the COVID-19 pandemic and outline the infection risks for residents and workers. In the second installment we will explore how improved regulation and enforcement, combined with liability rules, provide the best path forward to improve an industry that, despite its deficiencies, claims it deserves exceptional immunity.

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New TWIHL 182: Abortion Exceptionalism During COVID-19

By Nicolas Terry

I welcome three excellent guests this week. Our discussion centers around new abortion restrictions issued as part of state responses to COVID-19. For example, in Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott issued an executive order banning nonessential medical services. Subsequently, his attorney general interpreted that order as applying to all abortions. Planned Parenthood successfully applied for a temporary restraining order in the district court, only for the Fifth Circuit to lift the stay.

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New TWIHL with Wendy Mariner and Michael Ulrich

My guests are Wendy Mariner and Michael Ulrich. At Boston University School of Public Health, Mariner is the Edward R. Utley Professor of Health Law, Professor in the Center for Health Law, Ethics & Human Rights, Professor in the Department of Health Law, Policy & Management, and Director of the JD-MPH dual degree program. She is also a Professor of Law at Boston University School of Law and Professor of Medicine at Boston University School of Medicine.

Ulrich is a Professor of Health Law, Ethics, & Human Rights at the Boston University School of Public Health. His scholarship focuses on the intersection of public health, constitutional law, bioethics, and social justice, with an emphasis on the role of law in the health outcomes of vulnerable and underserved populations. Previously he was a Senior Fellow in Health Law, & Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School and a bioethicist in the Division of AIDS at the National Institutes of Health.

Our discussion concentrates on two aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic: (1) where the healthcare system is as far as capacity and resources, the impact of new federal legislation, and what else is needed and (2) what is the legal valence (if any) of terms such as “shelter in place” or “quarantine” and how will we calibrate more serious infringements on liberty such as lockdowns.

The Week in Health Law Podcast from Nicolas Terry is a commuting-length discussion about some of the more thorny issues in health law and policy. Subscribe at Apple Podcasts or Google Play, listen at Stitcher Radio, SpotifyTunein or Podbean.

Show notes and more are at TWIHL.com. If you have comments, an idea for a show or a topic to discuss you can find me on Twitter @nicolasterry or @WeekInHealthLaw.

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New TWIHL with Françoise Baylis

I welcome Dr. Françoise Baylis, University Research Professor at the NTE Impact Ethics interdisciplinary research team based at the Faculty of Medicine, Dalhousie University in Halifax Canada. She is a member of the Order of Canada and the Order of Nova Scotia, as well as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences. In 2017 she was awarded the Canadian Bioethics Society Lifetime Achievement Award. She is a distinguished researcher and prolific scholar with 200 or so books, refereed publications and chapters to her name. Her latest book published by Harvard University Press is Altered Inheritance: CRISPR and the Ethics of Human Genome Editing. At the time of recording we knew the book had been nominated for an Association of American Publishers Professional and Scholarly Excellence (or PROSE) award, which it subsequently won!

The Week in Health Law Podcast from Nicolas Terry is a commuting-length discussion about some of the more thorny issues in health law and policy. Subscribe at Apple Podcasts or Google Play, listen at Stitcher Radio, SpotifyTunein or Podbean.

Show notes and more are at TWIHL.com. If you have comments, an idea for a show or a topic to discuss you can find me on Twitter @nicolasterry or @WeekInHealthLaw.

pill bottle - buprenorphine / naloxone

Protecting the Vulnerable Substance Use Disorder Population During COVID-19

By Brandon George and Nicolas P. Terry

Introduction

Earlier this month, Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse identified those with substance use disorder (SUD) as a particularly vulnerable population during the COVID-19 pandemic. She highlighted the negative effects of opioid or methamphetamine use on respiratory and pulmonary health in addition to the disproportionate number of those with SUD who are homeless or incarcerated.

We detail the additional challenges faced by the SUD population and, specifically, the opioid use disorder (OUD) sub-group at this time, identify positive ameliorative steps taken by federal, state, and local governments, and recommend additional steps.

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New TWIHL with Julia Lynch

I welcome Dr. Julia Lynch, a Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on the politics of inequality and social policy in the rich democracies, particularly the countries of western Europe with a particular interest in comparative health policy and the politics of health inequalities; comparative political economy of western Europe; southern European politics; and the politics of aging. At Penn, she serves as the faculty director of the Penn In Washington Program, and co-directs the Penn-Temple European Studies Colloquium. Dr Lynch serves on the advisory board of the Italian Studies Program, is a Senior Fellow of the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, and edits Socio-Economic Review, a multi-disciplinary journal focusing on analytical, political and moral questions arising at the intersection of economy and society. Adding to her impressive list of publications is “Regimes of Inequality, The Political Economy of Health and Wealth” which has just been published by Cambridge University Press.

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New TWIHL with Kirk Nahra

A welcome back to Kirk Nahra, a partner at and co-chair of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Practice at WilmerHale in DC. A leader in the privacy bar, Mr. Nahra has been involved in developing the privacy legal field for 20 years. As a founding member and longtime board member of the International Association of Privacy Professionals, he helped establish the organization’s Privacy Bar Section. He has taught privacy issues at several law schools, including serving as an adjunct professor at the Washington College of Law at American University and at Case Western Reserve University. In addition, he currently serves as a fellow with the Cordell Institute for Policy in Medicine & Law at Washington University in St. Louis and as a fellow with the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology. We have a broad-ranging discussion about the last year in HIPAA enforcement, HHS-OCR’s apparent interest in access rights likely influenced by a highly publicized Ciitizen study, the HIPAA RFI, and the health privacy implications of California’s Consumer Privacy Act (or CCPA). Read More

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Naughty or Nice 2019? Guests, Zack Buck, John Cogan, and Jennifer Oliva

Ho-ho-ho! It’s the return of “Who’s Been Naughty or Nice?,” TWIHL’s infamous Holiday show. This year’s festive appreciation of those who work in the health care law and policy workshop features the seasonal vocalizations of Zack Buck, John Cogan, and Jennifer Oliva. Nominees for both naughty and nice include a wealth of administration players and policies, plenty of good and bad Medicaid news, drug pricing, and a whole lot more to fill our stockings and remind us that the consumption of prodigious amounts of egg nog is increasingly a quid pro quo for health law and policy work.

The Week in Health Law Podcast from Nicolas Terry is a commuting-length discussion about some of the more thorny issues in health law and policy. Subscribe at Apple Podcasts or Google Play, listen at Stitcher Radio, SpotifyTunein or Podbean.

Show notes and more are at TWIHL.com. If you have comments, an idea for a show or a topic to discuss you can find me on Twitter @nicolasterry or @WeekInHealthLaw.

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New TWIHL with Erin Fuse Brown and Elizabeth McCuskey

Erin Fuse Brown and Elizabeth McCuskey have a fantastic new article coming out in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review entitled “Federalism, ERISA, and State Single-Payer Health Care” that is the subject of our conversation.

Erin Fuse Brown is a Professor of Law at Georgia State University’s College of law. She teaches Administrative Law; Health Law: Financing & Delivery; and the Health Care Transactional & Regulatory Practicum. She is a faculty member of the Center for Law, Health & Society. In 2019 Professor Fuse Brown was awarded a grant from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation to study out-of-network air ambulance bills. She served as co-investigator on a grant from the National Human Genome Research Institute from 2014-2017 to study legal protections for participants in genomic research and in 2017 won the Patricia T. Morgan Award for Outstanding Scholarship among her faculty. Elizabeth McCuskey is a Professor Law at UMass School of Law, There she teaches Civil Procedure, Health Law, Food & Drug Law, and Health Care Antitrust courses. Her research focuses on regulatory reforms for health equity and courts’ roles in securing those reforms. She is broadly published and her work on ERISA preemption and state health reform was featured on Health Affairs Blog and she has covered FDA preemption for SCOTUSBlog. She was a 2016 ASLME Health Law Scholar.

The Week in Health Law Podcast from Nicolas Terry is a commuting-length discussion about some of the more thorny issues in health law and policy. Subscribe at Apple Podcasts or Google Play, listen at Stitcher Radio, SpotifyTunein or Podbean.

Show notes and more are at TWIHL.com. If you have comments, an idea for a show or a topic to discuss you can find me on Twitter @nicolasterry or @WeekInHealthLaw.