Health Law Policy Archives

Black and white photograph of the front of the Supreme Court. Pro-abortion protestors stand holding signs, one of which reads "I stand with Whole Woman's Health"

Call for Submissions: Journal of Law and the Biosciences Special Issue on Abortion Law

January 21, 2022January 21, 2022 The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

American law on reproduction seems likely to change, perhaps radically, in 2022, as the U.S. Supreme Court considers challenges to state laws limiting abortion. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Court is considering a substantive Mississippi ban on almost all abortions after 15 weeks; in Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson and United States v. Texas, the Court is considering the more procedural Texas “bounty hunter” statute for enforcing a ban on abortions after about five weeks.

In anticipation of the Court rulings on these cases, the Journal of Law and the Biosciences will publish a limited number of submissions as a two-part special issue on this general topic. The issue will focus on abortion law, but also include near-future issues for other human reproductive practices and technologies.

Field hospital in NY during COVID-19 pandemic.

Systemic Failures Need Systemic Solutions: COVID-19 and Macromedical Regulation

January 20, 2022January 21, 2022 The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Barak D. Richman and Steven L. Schwarcz

Among the many failures to mitigate the harm from COVID-19 in the U.S. has been the failure to meet surging demand for inpatient care. Hospital bed shortages, overwhelmed intensive care nurses, and scarcities of needed medical equipment have been embarrassing but constant features of the American health care landscape. A nation that spends nearly one out of every six dollars on health care should get much, much more for its money.

Though there is much blame to go around — and many insightful commentators have already allocated culpability — we observe that a significant regulatory deficiency has contributed to the nation’s failure to meet population health needs. This is the failure to regulate our hospitals holistically, as part of a comprehensive health care system.

Existing health care regulation focuses almost exclusively on regulating individual components of the health care industry. This existing regulation lacks the capacity to address how those components work together as a system — a system in which deficiencies in one component adversely impact the performance of the other components. We should not view hospitals as individual providers that treat individual patients. Instead, they are part of a larger safety net that needs to expand capacity when emergencies arise. Today’s pandemic destabilized hospital care because hospitals were neither coordinated nor managed systemically in order to meet population demands.

In Macromedical Regulation, 82 Ohio State Law Journal 727 (2021), we address the nation’s systemic failure to contain an infectious contagion, and we offer solutions by deriving lessons from the 2008 financial contagion. We contend that health care regulation must also include what we call “macromedical” regulation: regulation that focuses on protecting the stability of the health care sector as a system of interconnected parts.

Monthly Round-Up of What to Read on Pharma Law and Policy

January 19, 2022January 19, 2022 Ameet Sarpatwari Leave a comment

By Ameet Sarpatwari, Alexander Egilman, Aviva Wang, and Aaron S. Kesselheim

Each month, members of the Program On Regulation, Therapeutics, And Law (PORTAL) review the peer-reviewed medical literature to identify interesting empirical studies, policy analyses, and editorials on health law and policy issues.

Below are the citations for papers identified from the month of December. The selections feature topics ranging from a discussion of the challenges in confirming drug effectiveness after early approval, to an analysis of potential savings from a proposed policy requiring manufacturers of drugs receiving accelerated approval to pay higher rebates to Medicaid until efficacy is demonstrated, to an evaluation of the racial and ethnic representation in clinical trials supporting FDA approval of new drugs and biologics. A full posting of abstracts/summaries of these articles may be found on our website.

The Supreme Court’s Rulings on COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates, Explained

January 18, 2022January 18, 2022 Kaitlynn Milvert Leave a comment

By Kaitlynn Milvert

In a pair of rulings issued January 13, the Supreme Court put on hold the federal vaccine-or-test requirements for large employers, but allowed federal vaccination requirements for health care workers to take effect while they are litigated in the lower federal courts.

The Court decisions each addressed questions of whether federal agencies — the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) — have authority to set these vaccination-related requirements.

In doing so, the Court drew new and unprecedented lines between the kinds of risks that agencies operating outside of the health care context — such as OSHA — have power to address through federal regulations. The Court’s decisions on these issues are likely to loom large in future litigation as federal vaccine requirements continue to be litigated in the lower courts.

New Legal Mapping Method Highlights Recent Laws Limiting Public Health Emergency Orders

January 13, 2022January 13, 2022 Temple University Center for Public Health Law Research Leave a comment

By Katie Moran-McCabe

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, legislators in almost every state have introduced bills that would limit state executive authority to respond to the current pandemic or future public health emergencies. Between January 1, 2021, and November 5, 2021, one or more of these bills were enacted into law and became effective in 19 states.

This finding is a product of a new legal mapping method called Sentinel Surveillance of Emerging Laws and Policies (SSELP), developed by researchers from our Center for Public Health Law Research at Temple University (CPHLR), with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

This mapping method is intended to quickly capture and track emerging laws and legal innovations impacting public health, and to instigate faster evaluation of their effects on health and health equity.

Colorful lottery balls in a rotating bingo machine.

Equalizing the Genetic Lottery?

January 12, 2022January 12, 2022 James Toomey Leave a comment

By James Toomey

Kathryn Paige Harden’s The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality is a thoughtful, thorough, and well-written book about the compatibility of behavioral genetics with progressive ideology. Weaving together her own fascinating work in genetics with Rawlsian political philosophy, Harden’s book is necessary reading for anyone interested in inheritance or politics — which, I suppose, is everyone.

The basic argument of the book is that the so-called First Law of Behavioral Genetics is correct — everything is heritable. Harden supports this claim with a wealth of research in genetics over the past few decades, with an emphasis on her own contributions (“within a group of children who are all in school, nearly all of the differences in general [executive function] are estimated to be due to the genetic differences between them”). More importantly, Harden does not think this fact has the implications for normative politics that many, particularly on the left, worry it does. The fact that some genetic profiles cause higher general intelligence — or anything else — does not mean those who have them are better or more deserving of society’s bounty and social prestige. We can, and should, adopt “anti-eugenic” policies designed to make better as much as possible the lives of the genetically “unluckiest.”

Accepting Harden’s descriptive premises, I find her political theory basically right. But the book elides a crucial distinction in left-leaning political thought that, I think, misses something about why so many on the left find the prospect of the heritability of mental characteristics so troubling, and which perhaps diminishes the book’s ability to persuade its target audience (which, frankly, is not me, having been already convinced on much of this by The Blank Slate).

The Beginning of the End of Federalism As We Know It Here on Earth One and Earth 616?

January 10, 2022January 13, 2022 Jennifer S. Bard Leave a comment

By Jennifer Bard

Friday’s emergency hearing by the Supreme Court regarding the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) vaccine-or-test mandate was extraordinary both in that it happened at all and what took place.

The hearing came in a response to a petition by a coalition of states and the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) to halt an Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS) issued by OSHA mandating that all employers with over 100 employees “establish minimum vaccination standards” including “vaccination verification, face covering, and testing requirements.”

That the Court heard the case on an emergency basis signaled their concern that OSHA, in issuing the ETS, was overreaching its authority, as they ruled the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had done in issuing an eviction moratorium.

But what made the colloquies particularly unsettling is that the ETS was carefully crafted to be, as Professors Larry Gostin and Dorit Rubinstein Reiss explain lucidly, well within contemporary standards for an exercise of federal power affecting a health matter usually within the jurisdiction of a state. It applies only to employers already obligated to follow OSHA workplace standards and fell far short of a vaccine mandate. Moreover, however severe the risk of COVID when this was drafted six months ago, the risk from the Omicron variant is many times greater.

Yet the sympathetic ear given by the majority of the Justices to the arguments made by the lawyers seeking a stay made it possible to wonder if the whole thing was happening in either one of DC or the MCU’s multiverse. This is because the questioning, directly and by implication, calls into doubt what past Courts have identified as the framework of federalism — a nickname for the Constitution’s balancing of a strong federal government against the rights of individual states. We cannot know the extent to which the Justices will adopt any of the arguments offered them for limiting federal agency power, but from this hearing we can anticipate substantial strengthening of an individual state’s ability to resist federal regulation.

A Timeline of Biden’s Pandemic Response, Part 4: Winter of Death (December 2021 – Present)

January 10, 2022January 7, 2022 Justin Feldman Leave a comment

This series, which will run in four parts, has been adapted from “A year in, how has Biden done on pandemic response?” which was originally published on January 5, 2022 on Medium. Read the first, second, and third parts here.

By Justin Feldman

On December 1, 2021, the CDC issued a press release announcing that it had identified a case of the Omicron variant in the U.S. for the first time.

White House insiders admit that they were unprepared for Omicron, just as they were unprepared for Delta. Vice President Harris recently told an interviewer that the administration was caught flatfooted because their scientific advisors never warned that such variants could crop up (at least two of these advisors, Rick Bright and Celine Gounder, begged to differ).

While vaccination still provides powerful protection against hospitalization and death due to infection from Omicron, protection against symptomatic illness is weaker than before, particularly among those who have not received boosters. And though evidence is mounting that the risk of hospitalization and death is lower for each person infected compared to Delta, Omicron’s extremely high transmissibility means that a large fraction of the population will become infected in a short time period, particularly in the absence of additional public health measures.

On December 21, as the highly contagious variant started to sweep the country, President Biden delivered remarks about the new threat. For the hundred million Americans who remain unvaccinated, the president’s speech warned of the imminent risk of hospitalization and death. For the vaccinated and boosted, Biden’s message was: Keep Calm and Carry On, all will likely be fine. And for Wall Street, the speech was meant to provide a crucial piece of reassurance: There would be no federal support for public health measures that restrict commerce.

Eliminating Barriers to Opioid Use Disorder Treatment

January 10, 2022January 7, 2022 Jennifer Oliva Leave a comment

By Jennifer D. Oliva, Taleed El-Sabawi, and Shelly Weizman

The tragedy of the ever-worsening drug poisoning and overdose crisis in the United States is compounded by a simple fact: We know how to prevent overdose deaths, and yet, the overwhelming majority of individuals with opioid use disorder (OUD) lack access to the lifesaving, standard of care treatment.

Research demonstrates that the opioid agonist medications methadone and buprenorphine are the safest and most effective treatments for OUD. As the National Academy of Sciences explained in a 2019 report, these two medications reduce risk of death by up to 50 percent and are associated with numerous other benefits, including improved quality of life, reduced rates of use of other opioids, and reduced risk of contracting illnesses including HIV and hepatitis C.

However, during the worst drug poisoning crisis in U.S. history, which is now killing more than 100,000 people a year, the country’s outdated and restrictive federal regulatory schemes that pertain to methadone and buprenorphine present a pernicious and persistent barrier to accessing OUD medications.

A Timeline of Biden’s Pandemic Response, Part 3: We Have the Tools (Sept. – Dec. 2021)

January 7, 2022January 7, 2022 Justin Feldman Leave a comment

By Justin Feldman

Over the summer of 2021, concern grew that the vaccines were not providing the near-perfect protection against symptomatic disease and transmission that had first emboldened the administration to jettison other public health measures.

It was initially unclear whether the issue was Delta’s higher transmissibility or waning immunity from vaccines, as the first groups had been vaccinated nearly a year prior. There was noticeable concern from CDC, which acknowledged the “war has changed” in a set of leaked slides from July 29, 2021. Of particular concern were case reports from Massachusetts and internationally of high viral loads observed among those who were vaccinated and infected. In late July, CDC reversed course on its mask guidance and recommended indoor masking for all, including the fully vaccinated, in counties with high transmission. In late September 2021, CDC reversed course on its quarantine guidance, which had previously stated that fully vaccinated people should not quarantine after a known SARS-CoV-2 exposure.

These changing epidemiologic realities could have brought about a course correction and a push for other public health policies to complement vaccination. Instead, the administration mostly adapted by shifting its messaging.

Category: Health Law Policy