By Aparajita Lath
When it comes to health-related consumer purchases, buyers surely need to beware.
This is because the regulatory landscape of health-related products contains loopholes that allow false or misleading claims to proliferate. This article reviews recent instances of the issue, and discusses relevant regulations.
By Mitchell Berger, MPH
While the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) (5 U.S.C. § 552) and agency implementing regulations generally are fairly concise, FOIA still has led to considerable litigation.
What is an agency record? Should contractors be covered by FOIA? How and under what circumstances should a given FOIA exemption apply? How should FOIA search and duplication fees be charged by agencies, and what level of fees are reasonable? Debate continues about these and many other issues, but even amidst this debate opportunities abound to support FOIA implementation in the year ahead.
By Dustin Marlan
Advertisers are trying to market to us while we dream. This is not the science fiction of the film Inception or the series Black Mirror, but instead a troubling — and potentially illegal — new reality. To begin, consider three recent examples of dream advertising:
Are you ready to learn about “the most innovative piece of exercise equipment ever”? To take advantage of “the momentum of gravity to target your entire midsection”? Doesn’t everybody want to “lose those love handles nobody loves”? To finally “have the flat washboard abs and the sexy v-shape [they’ve] always wanted”? Within “just weeks, not months,” anybody can “firm and flatten their stomach.” And “best of all, it’s fun and easy and takes just three minutes a day.”
Despite its endorsement from an expert fitness celebrity and customer testimonials, you might be skeptical of the Ab Circle Pro’s claims. After all, can you really cut out five minutes from the iconic 8-Minute Abs routine?
Massive and misleading promises are an unfortunate reality for many exercise equipment advertisements. Illegitimate advertising claims can harm consumers and impact overall consumer trust, which creates an uphill battle for honest companies. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) already regulates exercise equipment, but supplementing its efforts with more consumer education and industry self-regulation could be a winning combination to restore trust in the fitness industry.
By Shelly Simana
On January 7, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that millions of vaccines are expected to arrive in Israel, and that by March, anyone who wishes to get vaccinated will be able to do so.
He concluded his speech with a controversial statement: “as part of the agreement [with Pfizer], we stipulated that Israel will serve as a global model state for a rapid vaccine rollout of an entire country… Israel will share with Pfizer, with all of humanity, the statistics that will help in developing strategies to defeat the coronavirus” (my translation, from Hebrew).
But which statistics, what kind of data, will be shared with Pfizer? This question remains a mystery.
By Laura Karas
The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) scored a victory on the price transparency front in June of this year with the D.C. Circuit decision in American Hospital Association v. Azar, No. 1:19-cv-03619-CJN.
The CMS final rule at issue in the suit requires price transparency for hospital items and services. The legal victory will begin to remedy the information asymmetry that has kept patients in the dark about hospital prices for far too long.
As the final rule states, its aim is to empower patients to become “active consumers” of health care “so that they can lead the drive towards value.” The rule is part of a federal effort to improve the ability of patients to make informed choices based on price and gain leverage to negotiate unreasonable hospital charges.
The American Hospital Association, the Association of American Medical Colleges, and several other groups brought suit to contest the CMS final rule mandating that hospitals make public and update annually certain “standard charges” for hospital “items and services.”
By Adrian Gropper, MD
As the U.S. reckons with centuries of structural racism, an important step toward making health care more equitable will require transferring control of health records to patients and patient groups.
The Black Lives Matter movement calls upon us to review racism in all aspects of social policy, from law enforcement to health. Statistics show that Black Americans are at higher risk of dying from COVID-19. The reasons for these disparities are not entirely clear. Every obstacle to data collection makes it that much harder to find a rational solution, thereby increasing the death toll.
By Beatrice Brown
There is currently a dire shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) at hospitals across the United States, especially in areas that have been hit the hardest by COVID-19.
PPE is essential to protecting those on the front lines of the pandemic – the President of the American Medical Association (AMA) has said that without adequate PPE, we may face a shortage of clinicians to treat COVID-19 patients, in addition to other shortages of critical resources.
Without adequate PPE, are clinicians morally obligated to provide care to patients who are either presumed positive for COVID-19 or who definitely have the virus?
Here, I argue that to treat patients without adequate PPE is supererogatory but not obligatory. In other words, this is a noble and praiseworthy act, but clinicians should not be obligated to perform these heroic acts, nor should we blame them, morally, for their decision to refuse to provide care.
By Cansu Canca
As coronavirus cases increase worldwide, institutions keep their communities informed with frequent updates—but only up to a point. They share minimal information such as number of cases, but omit the names of individuals and identifying information.
Many institutions are legally obligated to protect individual privacy, but is this prohibition of transparency ethically justified?
Some even go a step further and ask you, an individual in a community, to choose privacy over transparency as well. Harvard—alongside with Yale, Chicago, and Northwestern—requests you to “Please Respect Individuals’ Privacy. Anonymity for these individuals remains paramount. Please respect their privacy—even if you believe you know who they are—so they can focus completely on their health” (emphasis in original).
But do you have an ethical obligation to do so at the time of a pandemic?
By Adriana Krasniansky
Interest in artificially intelligent (AI) health care has grown at an astounding pace: the global AI health care market is expected to reach $17.8 billion by 2025 and AI-powered systems are being designed to support medical activities ranging from patient diagnosis and triaging to drug pricing.
Yet, as researchers across technology and medical fields agree, “AI systems are only as good as the data we put into them.” When AI systems are trained on patient datasets that are incomplete or under/misrepresentative of certain populations, they stand to develop discriminatory biases in their outcomes. In this article, we present three examples that demonstrate the potential for racial bias in medical AI based on training data. Read More