Court Enjoins N.Y. Ban on Large Sugary Drinks

By Wendy Parmet

New York State Supreme Court’s Justice Milton A. Tingling’s decision last night in New York Statewide Coalition of Hispanic Chambers of Commerce v. New York City Dpeartment of Health and Mental Hygiene, to enjoin New York City’s controversial ban on the sale of large sugary beverages should not have been surprising. As Scott Burris has noted here, “the public health side has been getting killed wherever law is made.” Defeats for new public health regulations, especially new regulations that impinge against powerful economic interests, are becoming the norm.

Still, there were some surprising and troubling, from a public health perspective, notes in Justice Tingling’s opinion, which relied heavily on Boreali v. Axelrod, a 1987 opinion by the New York Court of Appeals striking down a ban on indoor smoking, to find that the Department lacked authority to issue the regulation.

According to Justice Tingling, Boreali required the court to consider four factors including whether the regulation was based on matters beyond its stated purpose, and whether the regulation was “created on a clean slate thereby creating its own comprehensive set of rules without the benefit of legislative guidance.”   In looking to whether the ban on sugary sodas was based on factors other than its stated purpose, Justice Tingle noted among other things that the Department had cited the “enormous toll” that obesity places on the “economic health” of New Yorkers. To Justice Tingle any regard for the economic consequences of obesity demonstrated that the Department based its regulation “on economic and political concerns” outside the scope of its authority. Thus the very fact that the Department considered the economic consequences of the issue it addressed, a consideration that many scholars would claim is a critical component of sound regulatory policy, helped to doom the ban on large sodas. Would the Court, one wonders, have been more approving of the regulation if the Department had failed to show that obesity had significant economic consequences?  Somehow I suspect not.

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New Amicus Brief Filed on Behalf of Dr. Eric Lander in the Supreme Court in the Myriad (Gene Patent) Case

I am pleased to announce that Gideon SchorVern Noviel, and I filed an amicus brief on behalf of Dr. Eric S. Lander in a pending Supreme Court case that will address whether human genes are patentable.  The case is Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, No. 12-398 and will be argued April 15, 2013.  Lander is a leading genomics researcher and is President and Founding Director of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. We think the brief will play a key role in helping the Supreme Court chart a path through this legal thicket.  The full brief can be downloaded here https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/publications/supreme_court_preview/briefs-v2/12-398_neither_amcu_lander.pdf. Here is an excerpt from the brief, the Summary of the Argument:

This case hinges on a scientific question: whether DNA fragments from a human chromosome are (1) products of Nature or (2) at least similar enough to products of Nature that they should not be considered “markedly different.” Diamond v. Chakrabarty, 447 U.S. 303, 310 (1980).

The members of the Federal Circuit panel below agreed that the DNA of a whole human chromosome was a product of Nature. But the majority held that isolated DNA fragments of a human chromosome were not products of Nature.

Because the majority made (without citing scientific support) a foundational assumption that isolated DNA fragments of the human genome do not themselves routinely occur in Nature, it considered whether they are similar enough to products of Nature. Employing analogies, the panel members debated whether isolated DNA cleaved from a chromosome was akin to a leaf plucked from a tree, or a kidney surgically removed from a human body.

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Is Paying For Medical Care Like Buying A Used Car?

By Nadia N. Sawicki

Two recent publications prompt me to ask this question.

The first, forthcoming in JAMA Internal Medicine, is a study by Jaime Rosenthal, a student at Washington University in St. Louis.  Rosenthal and her colleagues set out to obtain pricing data for total hip arthroplasty from 20 top-ranked orthopedic hospitals and 102 representative general hospitals (two from each state and Washington DC).  Rosenthal, posing as the granddaughter of a 62-year old woman without health insurance, contacted each hospital numerous times to inquire about the total cost of the procedure.  Only 45% of the top-ranked hospitals and 10% of other hospitals were able to provide a complete bundled price; price estimates were obtained at 15% of ranked hospitals and 53% of other hospitals by contacting the hospital and physicians separately.  And perhaps most startlingly, the prices quoted for the procedure ranged from $11,000 to $125,798.  The authors’ conclusion is a modest one – that patients “may find considerable price savings through comparison shopping” – but I believe its impact is far greater.  In part because of the way health care is financed in our country, the average American consumer has little awareness of how much any given medical procedure actually costs.  But who can blame the consumer in this market, when those who provide the services themselves have no baseline against which to set costs?

This brings me to the second piece —  Steven Brill’s excellent article in Time Magazine, “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills are Killing Us,” which my co-blogger Patrick O’Leary blogged about last week.  ).   Brill spent half a year trying to understand why some nonprofit hospitals seem to function like prosperous businesses – with brand-new facilities, impressive executive compensation, and high profit margins.  He approached this problem by analyzing patients’ medical bills from hospitals, physicians, drug companies, “and every other player in the American health care ecosystem.”  Brill offers a scathing commentary on a system where patients are billed $18 per diabetes testing strip that can be purchased in boxes of 50 on Amazon.com for about 55 cents per strip.  Another example: one patient was billed $7,997.54 for a CT scan stress test that Medicare pays $554 for; and $3 for a reusable pen that marked where an incision would go.  These prices, Brill explains, are based on the chargemaster, a master document of prices kept by every hospital that is the basis for insurance negotiation reductions.  Nearly every executive he spoke with said that the chargemaster prices are irrelevant because “nobody gets charged those prices,” but Brill’s research suggests the contrary. Those without insurance, as we in the health law and policy community have long known, are charged more that those who are covered by insurance.  Brill’s article also follows medical billing advocates who negotiate patient bills down dramatically for patients who are willing to pay their fees; however, not every patient is so lucky.

The findings in Rosenthal’s and Brill’s articles are startling.  Few consumers, I would image, participate in the health care market with the understanding that the costs they might pay vary widely from institution to institution; that the prices they are asked to pay for a given procedure are far in excess of how much federal health programs believe the procedure is worth; or that they can “bargain down” their charges through skilled negotiation by someone with inside knowledge of the system.  Readers of this blog might chafe at the comparison between the market for health care and the market for used cars, but perhaps it is the used car dealer who should feel offended.  His customers, at least, can rely on the Kelley Blue Book.

Petrie-Flom Interns’ Weekly Round-Up: 3/2-3/8

By Hyeongsu Park and Kathy Wang

Family, Privacy, Secrets, & The Law

By Michele Goodwin

The Family, Privacy, Secrets, & The Law Roundtable (March 7-8. 2013) was a great success.  Kudos to the brilliant presenters and commentators who came together for this important, groundbreaking session, including Lori Andrews, Glenn Cohen, June Carbone, Laura Rosenbury, Camille Gear Rich, Martha Field, Deborah Epstein, Martha Ertman, Gaia Bernstein, Taunya Banks, Naomi Cahn, Michael Pinard, Karen Czapanskiy, and Eleanor Brown.  Thanks to all who attended and contributed to this excellent meeting.    Coverage can be found here and here.

Family, Privacy, Secrets & The Law

Join us for an important meeting:

Roundtable: Family, Privacy, Secrets & the Law  March 7-8, 2013

March 7-8, 2013
University of Maryland
Francis King Carey School of Law
500 West Baltimore Street
Baltimore, MD 21201

March 7, 5 p.m. – Book Reading and signing by Jonathan Odell, author of The Healing

March 8, 9 a.m. – 4 p.m. – Roundtable discussions

Eventbrite - Family, Privacy, Secrets & The Law Roundtable

Family, Privacy, Secrets & the Law roundtable engages the intersections of medicine, criminal law, family law, and constitutional law. The conference faculty will chart contemporary issues that span genetic privacy, disclosure of parental identity in assisted reproduction cases and DNA conscription to domestic violence and child sexual abuse.

There are times in which the law protects secrets, such as between a lawyer and client, doctor and patient, or clergy and congregant.  Yet, there are times when the law demands that secret-keepers reveal their confidences such as the increasing demand on doctors to disclose confidential medical information on pregnant women to law enforcement. How should we understand the contours and boundaries of these dynamics within the law?  On one hand, law tends to address secrets through the lens of legal duties to protect the vulnerable via its regulations governing abuse and neglect. On the other hand, this set of laws captures only a small percentage of secrets held by family members and other trusted “secret keepers” (doctors, clergy, extended family, neighbors) who, for a variety of reasons elect not to inform the state.

This roundtable interrogates states’ obligations to protect the vulnerable and at what cost. It considers the ways in which the law promises/owes protection and the success, failure or harms it brings about when endeavoring to intervene and offer protection. Against that backdrop, the law also has the obligation to honor individual and family autonomy and privacy.

Schedule

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