Tag: Petrie-Flom Center

Protect Those Who Protect Our Food

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

Check out a new op-ed by our friends, Jacob E. Gersen and Benjamin I. Sachs at Harvard Law School!

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — EVERY year, 5.5 million people are sickened by norovirus, a highly contagious gastrointestinal bug. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, norovirus is the leading cause of food-borne illness in the United States and is spread primarily by “infected food workers.” Last year cooks, waiters and other workers were involved in about 70 percent of the outbreaks.

This is just one example of the critical role that food workers play in our nation’s economic and public health systems. And yet, while we often tailor employment rules for work that has a special impact on the public, the law has yet to recognize food workers as a distinct class — an approach that harms consumers, the economy and the workers themselves.

Sick restaurant workers provide a particularly vivid example of the kind of legal reform that’s needed. Until recently, very few restaurant workers had the legal right to paid sick time, which meant that many of them went to work very ill (last week voters in Massachusetts and three cities passed paid-sick-leave laws). Federal law can fix this problem by requiring employers to provide their workers with paid time off. […]

To read the full op-ed, please click here.

The Medical Liability Climate: The Calm Between Storms Is the Time For Reforms

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By: Michelle Mello, JD, PhD
Stanford Law School and Stanford University School of Medicine

On November 4, Californians will vote on Proposition 46, a ballot initiative to adjust the $250,000 state’s noneconomic damages cap in medical malpractice cases for inflation, raising it to $1.1 million virtually overnight.  It’s a long overdue move – California has one of the most stringent damages caps in the country, and the cap really affects access to the legal system.  Now is the perfect time to do it, because after years of turbulence, the medical liability environment has calmed.

In an analysis published October 30 in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), David Studdert, Allen Kachalia and I report that data from the National Practitioner Data Bank show that the frequency and average cost of paid malpractice claims have been declining.  The rate of paid claims against physicians decreased from 18.6 to 9.9 paid claims per 1,000 physicians between 2002 and 2013, with an estimated annual average decrease of 6.3% for MDs and a 5.3% decrease for DOs. Among claims that resulted in some payment, the median amount paid increased from $133,799 in 1994 to $218,400 in 2007, an average annual increase of 5%. Since 2007 the median payment has declined, reaching $195,000 in 2013, an average annual decrease of 1.1%.

Trends in insurance premiums vary more according to which market you’re looking at, according to data from the Medical Liability Monitor’s Annual Rate Survey, but also look pretty favorable overall. None of the locations we examined showed large increases over the last 10 years, and most showed flat or declining premiums.  Read More

Tomorrow: Post-Trial Responsibilities Conference

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pills_genericvariety_slidePost-Trial Responsibilities: Ethics and Implementation

Thursday, September 18, 2014 7:30 AM – 5:30 PM

Wasserstein Hall, Milstein East AB, Harvard Law School, 1585 Massachusetts Ave.

The conference is free and open to the public, but due to limited seating, registration is required to attend. Please register here.

The term “post-trial access” is used broadly to connote a wide range of possibilities for providing continued access to study interventions (and potentially other care) once a trial is over, or a subject’s participation has ended.  For the purposes of this conference, we will focus discussions on the following:

  1. Continued access to study intervention(s) and/or other care for people who were enrolled in the clinical trial and were benefiting (whether between the end of the trial and product approval or indefinitely)
  2. Provision of the study intervention(s) and/or other care to people who were enrolled in the clinical trial but did not get the intervention and would like to try it (whether between the end of the trial and product approval or indefinitely)
  3. Provision of the study intervention, other care, or other resources to the community in which the trial was conducted

The full background, conference objectives, and agenda are now available on our website. 

Cosponsored by the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School and the Multi-Regional Clinical Trials Center at Harvard University. This event is also supported by the Oswald DeN. Cammann Fund.