Tag: Health Policy

A calculator, a stethoscope, and a stack of money rest on a table.

Why Our Health Care Is Incomplete: Review of “Exposed” (Part II)

Daniel G. Aaron 2 Comments

By: Daniel Aaron

Just last month, Professor Christopher T. Robertson, at the University of Arizona College of Law, released his new book about health care, entitled Exposed: Why Our Health Insurance Is Incomplete and What Can Be Done About It. Part II of this book review offers an analytical discussion of “cost exposure,” the main subject of his book with a focus on solutions. Read Part I here.

Baby solutions

Prof. Robertson writes two chapters on solutions. In the first, titled “Fixes We Could Try,” he offers reforms, from mild to moderate, that would make cost exposure less harmful. The chapter largely retains the analytical nature of the prior chapters, but it comes across like a chapter he might have rather not written. This is evident in the following chapter’s title, “What We Must Do.” It’s also evident because some of the proposals do not seem fully considered, and in some ways appear more controversial than the more comprehensive solution offered later. Read More

A calculator, a stethoscope, and a stack of money rest on a table.

Why Our Health Care Is Incomplete: Review of “Exposed” (Part I)

Daniel G. Aaron Leave a comment

By: Daniel Aaron

Just last month, Professor Christopher T. Robertson, at the University of Arizona College of Law, released his new book about health care, entitled Exposed: Why Our Health Insurance Is Incomplete and What Can Be Done About It. This book review will offer an analytical discussion of “cost exposure,” the main subject of his book.

What is cost exposure in health care?

Cost exposure is payments people make related to their medical care. There are many ways patients pay – here are a few common ones.

  • Deductible – Patient is responsible for the first, say, $5,000 of their medical care; after this point, the health insurance kicks in. Resets each year.
  • Copay – Patient pays a specific amount, say $25, when having an episode of care.
  • Coinsurance – Patient pays a specified percentage, say 20%, of care.

Read More

Premature baby left to die alone in sluice room, report reveals: A looming patient safety crisis in the NHS?

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By John Tingle

BBC News reported, 24/11/2016 on the Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust review of its Royal Oldham and North Manchester General hospitals which identified several ‘unacceptable situations’. The BBC news item states that the review document

“…described how a premature baby had arrived “just before the legal age of viability” – at 22 weeks and six days – but staff did not find “a quiet place” for the child’s mother “to nurse her as she died and instead placed her in a Moses basket and left her in the sluice room to die alone”.

The report goes on to catalogue a number of other shocking events that occurred. Read More

New dimensions in patient consent to treatment

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By John Tingle

In the patient care equation doctors  and nurses will always be in a more dominant and powerful position. They have the professional  knowledge the patient needs, they are in their usual environment. The patient is ill, not in their usual environment and is often thinking the worst about their condition. The law recognises the need to correct this power imbalance and cases have gone to court over matters such as patient informed consent to treatment. Modern cases emphasise the importance of patient autonomy against that of medical paternalism. In the House of Lords case of Chester v Afshar [2004] UKHL 41 involving consent to treatment failures, Lord Steyn stated:

“In modern law medical paternalism no longer rules and a patient has a prima facie right to be informed by a surgeon of a small, but well established, risk of serious injury as a result of surgery.” (Para 16).

The focus of the modern day law and that of many professional health organisations policy development is on patient rights, trying to balance the unequal care equation. Read More

Child safeguarding: the National Health Service (NHS) can do much better

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By John Tingle

Our children are our future and we need to look after them well. There is however a lot of evidence to suggest that we are failing our children in a number of key health areas. UNICEF in a report put the UK in 16th position – below Slovenia, the Czech Republic and Portugal – in a league table of child well-being in the world’s richest countries. The report considers five dimensions of children’s lives – material well-being, health and safety, education, behaviours and risks, and housing and environment – as well as children’s subjective well-being.

There are a number of health and other child well-being challenges for the UK to meet. The UNICEF report provides some useful context from which to view the recently published Care Quality Commission (CQC) report on the arrangements for child safeguarding and healthcare for looked after children in England.The CQC is the independent regulator of health and social care in England.Whilst the report does contain some positive findings, when read as a whole, these seem subsumed by the large number of negative findings, some of which are very worrying. Read More

General Medical Practice: Complaint Handling Issues

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By John Tingle

There is a new report from Health Service Ombudsman (HSO) on GP (General Medical Practitioner) complaint handling and major failings are revealed. The HSO makes the final decisions on complaints that have not been resolved in England and lies at the apex of the NHS complaints system. The report reveals that some GP practices are failing to handle patient complaints properly. The report is based on evidence from HSO casework files and intelligence gathered by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) , NHS England and Healthwatch England. One hundred and thirty-seven closed complaint cases from November 2014 – November 2015 were analysed. General medical practice forms 90% of all NHS interactions with the general public.The quality of complaint handling by GPs was found to be highly variable:

“…over half of the cases were either good (46%) or outstanding (9%). However, over a third required improvement (36%) and a tenth were inadequate (10%) (p7).”

The report states that there are five areas where general practice has the most scope for improvement: Read More

Looking Towards 2030 in Patient Safety

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By John Tingle

There is a clear need for those charged with patient safety policy making to prepare for the future and to take account of emerging trends. This would be so in any commercial or professional organisation. These issues were addressed in the context of patient safety at the recent,Patient Safety Global Action Summit held in March 2016 in London. The conference was designed to mirror the discussions contained in the report  by NIHR (National Institute for Health Research), Patient Safety Translational Research Centre at Imperial College London and The Imperial College NHS Trust on the priorities and direction that the patient safety movement should follow going towards 2030.

There is a lot that is excellent in this report  which is very rich in analysis and detail. Lots of deep thinking about patient safety issues with interesting and novel ideas expressed on nearly every page.

Emerging threats to patient safety

In the report, in chapter one, it is acknowledged that there are many existing issues at the root of patient harm that have yet to be solved. Also that unfortunately trends in healthcare are likely to increase the risks to safety. The report focuses on four emerging trends: Read More

DCIS Study Amplifies Questions and Demand for Answers

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By Dalia Deak

This week, a JAMA Oncology article made a splash when it intensified discussion around what ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) should be considered – cancer, precursor, or risk factor – and whether current treatment approaches have been effective. The New York Times, The Guardian, and others have picked up the story, and readers have reacted extensively, only amplifying a demand for answers to questions raised.

Often called Stage 0 breast cancer, DCIS is considered to be abnormal cells that are confined inside the milk ducts and, as such, are not considered invasive. Because of the increased risk associated with DCIS, many women who are found to have DCIS (a growing number considering the frequency of and improvements in mammography) undergo lumpectomies or mastectomies often accompanied by radiation therapy. Read More

THIS WEEK (3/18 – 3/20): Families Matter: Ethically, Legally, and Clinically

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Families Matter: Ethically, Legally, and Clinically

child_pediatrician_slide_270_200_85_c1March 18 – 20, 2015

Harvard Medical School
Joseph B. Martin Conference Center
77 Avenue Louis Pasteur
Boston, MA 02115

A full agenda is available on our website.

We often talk, in bioethics, about individual autonomy.  Yet our most challenging ethical, legal and clinical controversies in health care often center around family roles and responsibilities: How should we handle parents’ refusals of medically recommended treatment or, conversely, parents’ requests to medicate or surgically alter their children?  What should be known, and by whom, about a child’s genome, especially when genetic information effects other family members?  What weight should be given to family interests in decisions about a child’s health care?  How should we think about 3-parent embryos? Gamete donors? Gestational mothers? What rights and responsibilities should fathers have with regard to decisions about abortion and adoption, for example, as well as health care decisions for their offspring?  Health care decisions might be messier, but maybe they would also be better if we gave more attention to family matters, and how families matter.

This multidisciplinary program has been developed to inform and deliberate with ethicists, health care providers, attorneys and the public about changes in conceptions of the family and medical technologies and practices that challenge moral conventions and contemporary law.  Faculty experts and participants will engage in thoughtful discussion regarding a broad range of ethical and legal issues that arise from new ways of creating and new ways of understanding families and providing health care for expectant parents, growing fetuses, infants, children, adolescents….and their families.

Co-sponsored with the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School, with support from the Oswald DeN. Cammann Fund.

Tomorrow: A Conversation with Jim Doyle

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A Conversation with Jim Doyle
October 15, 2014 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM
Wasserstein Hall, Room 1019, 1585 Massachusetts Ave.

JimDoyleJoin the Harvard Health Law Society for a lunch talk with former Attorney General and Governor of Wisconsin Jim Doyle. Come hear about the former governor’s experiences tackling public health issues through state politics and join us for a Q&A session about health policy, health law careers, and politics. Governor Jim Doyle served as the 44th governor of Wisconsin and is recognized as a national leader in health care, energy, biotechnology, and many other areas. He has worked closely with the White House, high-ranking officials, and other governors. He currently serves as counsel for Foley & Lardner and is teaching a class at the Harvard School of Public Health this fall entitled “Health Policy, Leadership, and Politics at the State.”

Co-sponsored by the Center for Health Law Policy and Innovation and the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics.