Category: Human Rights

From Westworld to U.S. Prisons: Reframing the Debate on the Right to Health

aobodong Leave a comment

Is there a “Right to Health?” For many countries in the world, including Latin American countries like Brazil, the answer is easily in the affirmative. Similarly, in the hit HBO show Westworld, the “hosts” (androids on the verge of discovering consciousness) also possess a right to health. How so? Despite atrocious cruelty the human “guests” constantly inflict upon them, the company that runs Westworld maintains a highly extensive, functional “universal health care system” that employs the latest medical technologies for androids to take care of any health problems of all damaged hosts. The efficiency of the system is breathtaking: a cowboy host with 20 bullet wounds and a broken arm could be fully restored overnight; when the sun rises the next morning, the host returns to the simulated reality as if nothing happened.

Of course, the right to health in Westworld is not a result of democratic deliberations or judicial activism that invokes the UDHR or related treaty obligations. Instead, it originates in the sheer necessity of running a seamless alternate reality that requires good maintenance of the hosts, whom the Board depend on to please the guests and maximize the company’s profits. In other words, the physical wellbeing of the hosts is intrinsically tied to the functioning of the entire Westworld machinery and its profitability. Fixing them quickly and adequately allows them to return to their respective, pre-determined roles in a complex narrative with countless plots and subplot twists meticulously designed by their human masters. Read More

Privacy and Confidentiality: Bill of Health at Five Years and Beyond

Leslie Francis Leave a comment

In honor of the occasion of the Fifth Anniversary of Bill of Health, this post reflects on the past five years of what’s generally known as “privacy” with respect to health information.  The topic is really a giant topic area, covering a vast array of questions about the security and confidentiality of health information, the collection and use of health information for public health and research, commercialization and monetization of information, whether and why we care about health privacy, and much more.  Interestingly, Bill of Health has no categorizations for core concepts in this area:  privacy, confidentiality, security, health data, HIPAA, health information technology—the closest is a symposium on the re-identification of information, held in 2013.  Yet arguably these issues may have a significant impact on patients’ willingness to access care, risks they may face from data theft or misuse, assessment of the quality of care they receive, and the ability of public health to detect emergencies.

Over the past five years, Bill of Health has kept up a steady stream of commentary on privacy and privacy-related topics.  Here, I note just a few of the highlights (with apologies to those I might have missed—there were a lot!) There have been important symposia:  a 2016 set of critical commentaries on the proposed revisions of the Common Rule governing research ethics and a 2013 symposium on re-identification attacks.  There have been reports on the privacy implications of recent or proposed legislation: the 21st Century Cures Act, the 2015 proposal for a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights, and the proposed Workplace Wellness Bill’s implications for genetic information privacy.  Many comments have addressed big data in health care and the possible implications for privacy.  Other comments have been highly speculative, such as scoping out the territory of what it might mean for Amazon to get into the health care business. There have also been reports of research about privacy attitudes, such as the survey of participants in instruments for sharing genomic data online.  But there have been major gaps, too, such as a dearth of writing about the potential privacy implications of the precision medicine and million lives initiative and only a couple of short pieces about the problem of data security.

Here are a few quick sketches of the major current themes in health privacy and data use, that I hope writers and readers and researchers and most importantly policy makers will continue to monitor over the next five years (spoiler alert: I plan to keep writing about lots of them, and I hope others will too): Read More

REGISTER NOW! Behind Bars: Ethics and Human Rights in U.S. Prisons

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

Behind Bars: Ethics and Human Rights in U.S. Prisons
November 30 – December 1, 2017
Harvard Medical School campus
Longwood Medical Area, Boston, MA

The United States leads the world in incarceration. The “War on Drugs” and prioritizing punishment over rehabilitation has led to mass imprisonment, mainly of the nation’s most vulnerable populations: people of color, the economically disadvantaged and undereducated, and those suffering from mental illness. Although these social disparities are striking, the health discrepancies are even more pronounced. What can be done to address this health and human rights crisis?

This conference will examine various aspects of human rights and health issues in our prisons. In collaboration with educators, health professionals, and those involved in the criminal justice system—including former inmates, advocates, and law enforcement—the conference will clarify the issues, explore possible policy and educational responses, and establish avenues for action.

Registration for the conference is required. To learn more and to register, please visit the HMS Center for Bioethics website.

This event is cosponsored by the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School, the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School, and the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School.

The U.S. Drug Price Catastrophe and the Central Planner

aobodong Leave a comment

By Aobo Dong

If you are fortunate enough to have an insurance plan with extensive coverage and low co-pays for prescription drugs, chances are you may not be overly concerned with the U.S. drug price catastrophe. For millions of Americans without such a plan, getting the much-needed prescribed medicine often involves frustrating multi-player exchanges between the pharmacy, the insurance company, and the doctor, due to complications such as drug pricing and pre-authorization.

The NYT recently launched an investigation into a simple question: “Why Are Drug Prices So High?” One surprising revelation from the study is that deep drug pricing problems may have been contributing to the ongoing opioid crisis, as insurers restrict patient access to less addictive alternatives. For instance, UnitedHealthcare stopped covering Butrans – a drug that had successfully helped Alisa Erkes to ease her excruciating abdominal pain for two years – just to lower its own expenses. Instead, Alisa’s doctor had to put her on long-acting morphine – a drug in a higher category for risk of abuse and dependence than Butrans. However, since it costs the insurance company only $29 a month, UnitedHealthcare covered it with no questions asked. Read More

REGISTER NOW! Behind Bars: Ethics and Human Rights in U.S. Prisons

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

Behind Bars: Ethics and Human Rights in U.S. Prisons
November 30 – December 1, 2017
Harvard Medical School campus
Longwood Medical Area, Boston, MA

The United States leads the world in incarceration. The “War on Drugs” and prioritizing punishment over rehabilitation has led to mass imprisonment, mainly of the nation’s most vulnerable populations: people of color, the economically disadvantaged and undereducated, and those suffering from mental illness. Although these social disparities are striking, the health discrepancies are even more pronounced. What can be done to address this health and human rights crisis?

This conference will examine various aspects of human rights and health issues in our prisons. In collaboration with educators, health professionals, and those involved in the criminal justice system—including former inmates, advocates, and law enforcement—the conference will clarify the issues, explore possible policy and educational responses, and establish avenues for action.

Registration for the conference is required. To learn more and to register, please visit the HMS Center for Bioethics website.

This event is cosponsored by the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School, the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School, and the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School.

Webinar, 6/28: Procedural Aspects of Compulsory Licensing under TRIPS

Timo Minssen Leave a comment

Join us at yet another webinar with J. Wested at the University of Copenhagen. This time we will debate procedural issues in compulsory licensing with H. Grosse Ruse-Kahn (University of Cambridge) & M. Desai (Eli Lilly). Further information on our webinar series is available at here, here, and below:

Procedural Aspects of Compulsory Licensing under Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS)

Wednesday 28. June 2017
4-6 p.m (CEST)
Sign-up & questions: Jakob.blak.wested@jur.ku.dk

This webinar on “TRIPS and the life sciences” will approach the question of compulsory licensing by looking at the technical and procedural requirements applied by courts when evaluating a petition for a compulsory license.  

The balancing of the instrumental application of patent rights as a stimulator of innovation and the public interest in having access to these innovations form a controversial trajectory of discourse, which is as old as patent law. Compulsory licenses are one of the means that have been applied throughout the history of patent law, to condition this complex intersection of interests. The TRIPS agreement is no exception and art 31 contains the provision for member states to grant CL. In 2013, the Indian authorities granted a compulsory license to NATCO Pharmaceuticals for Bayers patented pharmaceutical product Carboxy Substituted Diphenyl Ureas, useful for the treatment of liver and kidney cancer. This decision raised several issues regarding the procedures and requirements to be met in order to grant a compulsory license. Furthermore, in January 2017 an amendment to TRIPS agreement entered into force allowing compulsory licensors to export their generic pharmaceuticals to least developed countries, further recalibrating the intersection of the monopoly power of the patent and public interest. Read More

Fetal Consequentialism and Maternal Mortality

Nadia Sawicki Leave a comment

By Nadia N. Sawicki

It is well known that maternal mortality rates in the United States are higher than in other countries in the developed world, and that many of these deaths are preventable. But a report published by NPR last week, just a few days before Mother’s Day, drew a direct link between these poor maternal outcomes and health care providers’ focus on fetal health. The report quotes Barbara Levy, vice president for health policy and advocacy at the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, who said, “We worry a lot about vulnerable little babies, [but] we don’t pay enough attention to those things that can be catastrophic for women.” According to the authors of the NPR report, “newborns in the slightest danger are whisked off to neonatal intensive care units … staffed by highly trained specialists prepared for the worst,” while new mothers are instead monitored by nurses and physicians “who expect things to be fine and are often unprepared when they aren’t.”

These patterns are consistent with what Prof. Jamie Abrams calls “fetal consequentialism” – the premise that the birth of a healthy child outweighs any harm to the birthing mother. The increase in U.S. maternal mortality rates highlighted in the NPR report is certainly a product of such fetal consequentialism. So is the practice of obstetric violence, described in my previous posts, where health care providers dismiss birthing mothers’ informed requests for minimal intervention during labor and delivery in an effort to reduce the risk of fetal harm, even when that risk is minimal. Fetal consequentialism is likely driven not only by providers’ judgments of the relative liability risks for harms to fetuses versus harms to mothers, but also by conservative societal trends (evidenced by increasing anti-abortion legislation) that preference fetal interests over maternal interests. Read More

Petrie-Flom Center Welcomes New Executive Director!

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

PFC Logo-New-Horizontal_slide

shachar_peopleWe are thrilled to announce that Carmel Shachar, JD, MPH (HLS ’10, HSPH ’10) will join the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School as our next Executive Director. In this role, Carmel will be responsible for oversight of the Center’s sponsored research portfolio, event programming, fellowships, student engagement, development, and a range of other projects and collaborations.

“We are delighted that Carmel will be joining the Center,” said I. Glenn Cohen, Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Petrie-Flom Center. “Throughout her career, Carmel has focused on designing, developing, and executing large health law and policy projects. This expertise and leadership will be a strong resource for the Center as it implements the vision for its second decade.”  Read More

Birth Plans as Advance Directives

Nadia Sawicki Leave a comment

By Nadia N. Sawicki

There is growing public recognition that women’s autonomy rights during labor and delivery are being routinely violated. Though such violations rarely rise to the level of egregious obstetric violence I described in an earlier blog post, women recognize that hospital births, even for the most low-risk pregnancies, often involve cascades of medical interventions that lack evidence-based support and can have negative health consequences for both mother and child. Indeed, evidence suggests that an increasing number of women are pursuing options like midwife-assisted birth, delivery in free-standing birthing centers, and even home birth in an effort to avoid interventionist hospital practices. According to the 2013 Listening to Mothers Survey, nearly six in ten women agree that birth is a process that “should not be interfered with unless medically necessary.”

One tool that women frequently use to increase the likelihood that their autonomous choices will be respected during labor and delivery is the birth plan, a document that outlines a woman’s values and preferences with respect to the birthing process, and serves as a tool for facilitating communication with care providers. However, while most women view the creation of a birth plan as empowering, there is little evidence to suggest that the use of birth plans actually improves communication, increases women’s feelings of control, or affects the process or outcome of childbirth. In fact, there appears to be some resistance within the medical community to women’s reliance on birth plans, with one article describing “the two words ‘birth plan’ strik[ing] terror in the hearts of many perinatal nurses.”  Read More

Patenting Bioprinting Technologies in the US and Europe – The Fifth Element in the Third Dimension

Timo Minssen Leave a comment

By Timo Minssen

I am happy to announce the publication of our new working paper on  “Patenting Bioprinting Technologies in the US and Europe – The 5th element in the 3rd dimension.” The paper, which has  been co-authored by Marc Mimler, starts out by describing the state of the art and by examining what sorts of bioprinting inventions are currently being patented. Based on our findings we then discuss what types of future innovations we can expect from the technological development and how far these would and/or should be protectable under European and US patent laws.

The paper is forthcoming in: RM Ballardini, M Norrgård & J Partanen (red), 3D printing, Intellectual Property and Innovation – Insights from Law and Technology. Wolters Kluwer, but the working paper is already available on SSRN. Read More