Category: Personal Responsibility

Racism in Transplant Denial? Or Too Few Hearts To Go Around?

Michele Goodwin Leave a comment

By Michele Goodwin

Anthony Stokes, a fifteen year old kid from Decatur County, Georgia, is expected to die in a matter of months, according to his doctors at the Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.  Maybe, they say, he will live for six months.  Who knows?  Anthony suffers from an enlarged, increasingly less functional heart.  His condition is not unusual, and a reasonably effective cure is at hand: a heart transplant. (Learn more about Anthony’s story here.)

However, Anthony has become the latest victim of a dysfunctional U.S. transplantation system, which tempts Americans with a transplant waiting list, but kicks them off if they become too sick or too old.  The problem is that there are too few organs to meet demand, and this perennial problem receives far too little attention from Congress.  Indeed, the U.S. transplantation list, coordinated by the United Network for Organ Sharing, UNOS, (a private organization that coordinates significant aspects of the U.S. transplant system) is so overcrowded that patients increasingly turn to black markets in India, China, Pakistan, South Africa, and other countries if they hope to survive.  (Learn more about that here.) Congressional hearings document Chinese prisoners dying and shortly thereafter Americans receiving organs.

Anthony’s family and some local organizations claim that racism is behind doctors refusing to place the boy on the transplant list.  Anthony is African American.  They ask, what is the harm in letting him on the list?

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Art Caplan on teen organ transplants

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Art Caplan has a new opinion piece up at nbcnews.com. In “Ethicist: Teens have high failure rates after organ transplants — but cut them some slack,” Caplan responds to a recent study showing that teen organ recipients have much higher failture rates than recipients in other age groups:

Remember the long fight over whether Sarah Murnaghan, the little 10-year-old girl from suburban Philadelphia who was dying from cystic fibrosis, should have a shot at getting a transplant from lungs taken from an adult? The fight hinged in part on whether there was sufficient evidence to show that adult lungs would work as well in Sarah, who is still struggling to recover from two lung transplants, as they would in another adult where they would fit better. Some, including me, argued that the best way to allocate scarce lungs for Sarah or anyone else is to determine who is most likely to live if they get them.

That may seem a sensible ethical policy to use when there are not enough organs for all. But there is a new study out that calls into question the merits of an efficacy-only rationing policy.

Read the full article here.

Guest Post: No liability for failure to vaccinate? The case has not been made: A Response to Mary Holland

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff 11 Comments

As of Friday, June 28, this post is closed to further comments. We want to thank the many readers who have engaged in a vigorous and civil discussion on the recent posts to the Bill of Health that engage questions related to the debate over vaccines. In general, we do not moderate discussions on the site. However, due to an increasing number of comments that violate our policies regarding abusive and defamatory language and the sharing of personal information, we are closing these posts to comment.

By Dorit Rubinstein Reiss, LLB, Ph.D.

Dorit Rubinstein Reiss (LLB, Ph.D.) is Professor of Law at UC Hastings College of the Law. She has published articles on regulation and administrative law and teaches tort law. She is also a member of the Parents Advisory Board of Voices for Vaccines and writes the blog Before Vaccines. 

In a guest post on this blog, Mary Holland, JD, suggests that there are no grounds for imposing tort liability on parents for failure to vaccinate alone, even if it led to another person being infected. Holland’s post is courteous and matter-of-fact, and there are certainly arguments for that position, especially the argument that common law rarely imposes a duty to act. But Ms. Holland did not make that case.

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Guest Post: Crack Down on Those Who Don’t Vaccinate?: A Response to Art Caplan

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff

As of Friday, June 28, this post is closed to further comments. We want to thank the many readers who have engaged in a vigorous and civil discussion on the recent posts to the Bill of Health that engage questions related to the debate over vaccines. In general, we do not moderate discussions on the site. However, due to an increasing number of comments that violate our policies regarding abusive and defamatory language and the sharing of personal information, we are closing these posts to comment.

By Mary Holland, J.D.

Mary Holland is Research Scholar and Director of the Graduate Legal Skills Program at NYU Law School. She has published articles on vaccine law and policy, and is the co-editor of Vaccine Epidemic: How Corporate Greed, Biased Science and Coercive Government Threaten Our Human Rights, Our Health and Our Children (Skyhorse Publishing, 2012). 

Dr. Art Caplan recently posted an editorial, “Liability for Failure to Vaccinate,” on this blog. He argues that those who contract infectious disease should be able to recover damages from unvaccinated people who spread it. If you miss work, or your baby has to go to the hospital because of infectious disease, the unvaccinated person who allegedly caused the harm should pay. Dr. Caplan suggests that such liability is apt because vaccines are safe and effective. He sees no difference between this situation and slip-and-fall or car accidents due to negligence. Arguing that “a tiny minority continue to put the rest of us at risk,” he suggests that public health officials can catch the perpetrators and hold them to account through precise disease tracing.

Dr. Caplan’s assertions to the contrary, vaccines are neither completely safe nor completely effective. In fact, from a legal standpoint, vaccines, like all prescription drugs, are “unavoidably unsafe.”  [See, e.g., Bruesewitz v. Wyeth, 562 U.S. __ (2011).‎] Industry considered its liability for vaccine injury so significant that it lobbied Congress for the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, providing doctors and vaccine manufacturers almost blanket liability protection for injuries caused by federally recommended vaccines. [See Authorizing Legislation.] The liability risk was so serious that the federal government created a special tribunal under the 1986 Act, the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, to pay the injured. Moreover, the Supreme Court in 2011 decided Bruesewitz v. Wyeth, prohibiting any individual from filing a civil suit for a defectively designed vaccine in any court in the country. Industry’s extraordinary protection against liability for vaccine injury does not correspond with glib statements, like those of Dr. Caplan, that vaccines are safe and effective. On the contrary, the law acknowledges that vaccines cause injury and death to some, with no screening in place to mitigate harm.  Read More

ACA Final Rule on Wellness Plans

Leslie Francis Leave a comment

By Leslie Francis

On May 29th, HHS issued the final rule governing wellness incentives in group health plans. While the incentives themselves are not a surprise, the scope they are given is worthy of ongoing attention. Wellness incentives have been controversial because of their potential for intrusion into individual choice, their subtle (or not so subtle) coerciveness, their valorization of a particularly model of health, and the possibility that they will impose differential burdens and costs on people with disabilities or other disfavored groups. The final rule attempts to meet these objections in several helpful ways.

Nonetheless, the final rule still will allow programs that are differentially burdensome as a result of factors other than health status. It will also allow programs under which it is more difficult for some than for others to obtain rewards because of their states of health. In programs that give rewards for health outcomes, alternatives must be available for those who do not meet targets—but the reasonableness standard for these alternatives permits requirements that may be differentially burdensome so if they are medically appropriate and follow the recommendations of the patient’s personal physician. HHS supports wellness programs as engaging individuals in their health, as encouraging them in healthy behaviors and discouraging them in unhealthy behaviors, and as incentivizing people to make use of recommended health care services such as screenings. Read More

More on Liability for Failure to Vaccinate

acaplan

As of Friday, June 28, this post is closed to further comments. We want to thank the many readers who have engaged in a vigorous and civil discussion on the recent posts to the Bill of Health that engage questions related to the debate over vaccines. In general, we do not moderate discussions on the site. However, due to an increasing number of comments that violate our policies regarding abusive and defamatory language and the sharing of personal information, we are closing these posts to comment.

Art Caplan discusses his recent Bill of Health post over at WBUR’s Here and Now.  Take a listen.

Liability for Failure to Vaccinate

acaplan 150 Comments

As of Friday, June 28, this post is closed to further comments. We want to thank the many readers who have engaged in a vigorous and civil discussion on the recent posts to the Bill of Health that engage questions related to the debate over vaccines. In general, we do not moderate discussions on the site. However, due to an increasing number of comments that violate our policies regarding abusive and defamatory language and the sharing of personal information, we are closing these posts to comment.

By Art Caplan

Measles are breaking out all over Britain.  Getting fewer headlines is the fact that measles are back in the USA too.  In fact they are in our region.  A mini-epidemic is raging in Brooklyn.  Measles for cripes sake!  The disease that many of us over 60 had as kids that should never occur is back with a vengeance.  The reason for the diseases reappearance is simple—failure to vaccinate.  Maybe it is time to get tough on those whose choices put others at risk.

For decades, there has been a safe, effective vaccine that works exceedingly well against the measles–95% full protection for a kid who has been vaccinated– and nearly equally well at preventing transmission to others.  The more people have been vaccinated the tougher it is for measles to gain a foothold.

NY City health officials have reported 30 cases so far–26 in Borough Park and four more in Williamsburg.  The NY Daily News reports that the consequences of this outbreak have been dire:

“There have been two hospitalizations, a miscarriage and a case of pneumonia as a result of this outbreak,” a Health Department spokeswoman said. “All cases involved adults or children who were not vaccinated due to refusal or delays in vaccination.”

So far the outbreak has been among religious Jews some of whom shun getting the vaccine for their kids out of fear it causes autism Dr. Yu Shia Lin of Maimonides Medical Center in Borough Park told The News.

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Sleep No More: Sleep Deprivation, Doctors, and Error or Is Sleep the Next Frontier for Public Health?

I. Glenn Cohen 1 Comment

[Cross-Posted at Prawfsblawg]

How often do you hear your students or friends or colleagues talk about operating on very little sleep for work or family reasons? In my case it is often, and depending on the setting it is sometimes stated as a complaint and sometimes as a brag (the latter especially among my friends who work for large law firms or consulting firms). To sleep 7-8 hours is becoming a “luxury” or perhaps in some eyes a waste – here I think of the adage “I will sleep when I am dead” expresses that those who need sleep are “missing out” or “wusses.” My impression, anecdotal to be sure, is that our sleep patterns are getting worse not better and that many of these bad habits (among lawyers) are learned during law school.

One profession that has dealt with these issues at the regulatory level is medicine. In July 2011, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) – the entity Responsible for the accreditation of post-MD medical training programs within the United States – implemented new rules that limit interns to 16 hours of work in a row, but continue to allow 2nd-year and higher resident physicians to work for up to 28 consecutive hours. In a new article with sleep medicine expert doctors Charles A. Czeisler and Christopher P. Landrigan that just came out in the Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics, we examine how to make these work hour rules actually work.

As we discuss in the introduction to the article

Over the past decade, a series of studies have found that physicians-in-training who work extended shifts (>16 hours) are at increased risk of experiencing motor vehicle crashes, needlestick injuries, and medical errors. In response to public concerns and a request from Congress, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) conducted an inquiry into the issue and concluded in 2009 that resident physicians should not work for more than 16 consecutive hours without sleep. They further recommended that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Joint Commission work with the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) to ensure effective enforcement of new work hour standards. The IOM’s concerns with enforcement stem from well-documented non-compliance with the ACGME’s 2003 work hour rules, and the ACGME’s history of non-enforcement. In a nationwide cohort study, 84% of interns were found to violate the ACGME’s 2003 standards in the year following their introduction.

Whether the ACGME’s 2011 work hour limits went too far or did not go far enough has been hotly debated. In this article, we do not seek to re-open the debate about whether these standards get matters exactly right. Instead, we wish to address the issue of effective enforcement. That is, now that new work hour limits have been established, and given that the ACGME has been unable to enforce work hour limits effectively on its own, what is the best way to make sure the new limits are followed in order to reduce harm to residents, patients, and others due to sleep-deprived residents? We focus on three possible national approaches to the problem, one rooted in funding, one rooted in disclosure, and one rooted in tort law. I would love reactions to our proposals in the paper, but wanted to float the more general idea in this space.

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Curbing Obesity: What Are We Doing?

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

[Ed. Note: Posted on behalf of Sarah Fudin, who works in community relations for the George Washington University’s online Master of Public Health program, dubbed MPH@GW, which offers students the ability to earn their MPH online.] 

The whole world knows that Americans are increasingly becoming obese, but solving the problem isn’t as easy as pointing it out. While the individual implications of obesity have been painfully clear for some time, there has been more discussion in recent years of how obesity impacts the economy. According to an infographic by MPH@GW, “The Cost of Obesity,” lowering the national obesity rate by just five percent could eliminate 13 percent of the federal deficit over the next 20 years. Re-framing the obesity epidemic in economic terms could be a way to persuade Americans to tackle obesity through public health legislation.

Support for Anti-Obesity Laws

Although the conventional wisdom in recent years has been that the American public resists public health laws, a recent study indicates that the public might actually be more welcoming of legislation than first thought. The study demonstrated that Americans tend to support non-intrusive public health legislation — bans on smoking in public places, for instance, but not bans on smoking in private residences. The key factor in rallying public support for a bill seems to be that the bill’s authors understand the public’s values, which may mean that it will be easier to pass public health laws as our national conversation about obesity evolves.

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Happy Public Health Week: “We’re Good Enough, We’re Smart Enough, and Doggone It, People Like Us”

Temple University Center for Public Health Law Research Leave a comment

By Scott Burris

We may be living in a golden age of group-think. A weekly reminder is poor Paul Krugman railing against the apparently universal belief in America and Europe that we’ve got to cut budgets right now or disaster will strike. He calls this a Zombie idea, a false claim that has been falsified with plenty of stakes in the heart, silver bullets and blows to the head, but will not stay in the grave.

Closer to home for us in public health is the claim that Americans don’t like government rules regulating their behavior and meddling with their preferences.  Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler have delivered some solid blows to the idea that paternalism typically messes with solid preferences. As we celebrate Public Health Week, I want to highlight two recent papers that show that Americans, like the children in Mary Poppins, actually like their nannies, who do some pretty great things.

Public Health Law Research has recently posted the manuscript of a paper that Evan Anderson and I have prepared for the Annual Review of Law and Social Science. The paper describes the dramatic rise of law as a tool of public health since the 1960s in five major domains: traffic safety, gun violence, tobacco use, reproductive health and obesity.  These topical stories illustrate both law’s effectiveness and limitations as a public health tool. They also establish its popularity by the most apt of metrics – the willingness of legislators to enact it. The one picture worth a thousand words, below, depicts the rapid adoption of a variety of interventions by state legislatures. (By the way, the five examples also show that public health law research can and does influence the development and refinement of legal interventions over time.)

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