Supreme Court - Bill of Health

A Legislative Override Could Save the ACA (and Fix Other Misapplications of Health Laws)

May 6, 2021May 20, 2021 The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By John Aloysius Cogan, Jr.

The Congressional Democrats and the Biden administration need not wait for the Supreme Court to determine the fate of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in California v. Texas; they can take charge of the case today by enacting and signing into law overriding legislation.

Since the threat to the ACA is based on the interpretation of a federal statute — the ACA’s “inseverability clause” — Congress is within its rights to take charge of the case. Why? Because courts are not the final word on the meaning of a statute, Congress is.

Bill of Health - A worker gives directions as motorists wait in lines to get the coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccine in a parking lot at Dodger Stadium, Friday, Jan. 15, 2021, in Los Angeles, covid vaccine distribution

Can Vaccine Allocation Plans Legally Respond to Racial Disparities?

March 29, 2021March 26, 2021 Govind Persad Leave a comment

By Govind Persad

Recently, Missouri expanded phase 2 vaccination eligibility with the goal of addressing disproportionate COVID-19 impacts.

Specifically, Missouri’s policy applies to “Disproportionately Affected Populations,” which is further defined as: “Populations at increased risk of acquiring or transmitting COVID-19, with emphasis on racial/ethnic minorities not otherwise included in 1B.”

This presents a much-debated and often misunderstood question I explore in a forthcoming University of Illinois Law Review article: can COVID-19 vaccine allocation legally recognize the outsized burden of cases and deaths that racial/ethnic minority communities have borne during the pandemic?

Los Angeles, California / USA - May 1, 2020: People in front of Los Angeles’ City Hall protest the state’s COVID-19 stay at home orders in a “Fully Open California” protest.

5 Questions About COVID-19 and Religious Exemptions

March 17, 2021March 16, 2021 Chloe Reichel Leave a comment

By Chloe Reichel

On February 26^th, the Supreme Court of the United States issued a shadow docket decision that could foretell sweeping limitations for public health measures, both within and outside the COVID-19 pandemic context.

The Court’s ruling in the case, Gateway City Church v. Newsom, blocked a county-level ban on church services, despite the fact that the ban applied across the board to all indoor gatherings. This religious exceptionalism is emerging as a key trend in recent Supreme Court decisions, particularly those related to COVID-19 restrictions.

To better understand what these rulings might mean for public health, free exercise of religion, the future of the COVID-19 pandemic, and potential vaccine mandates, I spoke with Professor Elizabeth Sepper, an expert in religious liberty, health law, and equality at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law.

The Patent Trial and Appeal Board Returns to the Supreme Court

March 15, 2021March 12, 2021 The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Gregory Curfman

For the second time in the span of just three years, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) within the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is under scrutiny by the Supreme Court.

How the Supreme Court decides this latest PTAB case, United States v. Arthrex, will have important implications for patent law and for administrative law more generally.

When “Pay-for-Delay” Becomes “Delay-Without-Pay”: Humira Antitrust Claims

February 1, 2021January 29, 2021 Laura Karas Leave a comment

By Laura Karas

In June 2020, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois dismissed state and federal antitrust claims against AbbVie, maker of Humira (adalimumab), for accruing more than 130 patents on the top-selling drug and asserting allegedly unmeritorious patent infringement claims against makers of adalimumab biosimilars. AbbVie then settled the patent infringement litigation by entering into agreements with eight drug makers to allow adalimumab biosimilars to enter the U.S. market in 2023 and the European market in 2018.

In my last post, I discussed the district court’s memorandum opinion finding that “the vast majority” of AbbVie’s conduct was not “objectively baseless petitioning” and was therefore immunized under the Noerr-Pennington doctrine. In this post, I explore several problematic aspects of the court’s reasoning for rejecting the claims of pay-for-delay and market allocation.

Advantages of Using the Congressional Review Act to Revoke Health Care Waivers

January 11, 2021January 8, 2021 mlawrence Leave a comment

By Matthew B. Lawrence

The Trump Administration has granted health care waivers that the Biden Administration will surely look to end, including work requirement waivers that the Supreme Court is going to consider in Azar v. Gresham. How the Biden Administration approaches this task may set precedents that last far into the future, which is one argument in favor of considering the Congressional Review Act as a potential path forward.

Waivers are a huge part of health policy. They entail a state seeking approval from the federal government to make various changes to ACA or Medicaid programs. Waivers are normally approved for several years at a time, and routinely renewed. They foster experimentation, and are also (or especially) a tool the federal government uses to steer national health policy by pushing states to adopt some reforms and not others, as I explain in a forthcoming article.

Over at the Yale Journal of Regulation blog, I describe how the Congressional Review Act (CRA) could potentially be used to revoke health care waivers (like community engagement, aka work requirement, waivers).

In brief, the CRA is a way Congress can change the law to revoke agency actions without the votes necessary to override a filibuster. The CRA might be a cleaner alternative for revoking health care waivers than administrative revocation by the Biden Administration. One big policy advantage of this route is that it wouldn’t come back to haunt health policy. Revocations through the administrative process would set a precedent that could undermine the stability of all waivers, but revocations through the CRA would not.

The COVID-19 Pandemic Reveals the Stakes of the Campaign Against Abortion

December 1, 2020November 30, 2020 The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Mary Ziegler

Once again, we’re talking about whether abortion counts as health care. The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked new efforts to limit access, from the government’s unwillingness to lift in-person requirements for medication abortion to the introduction of stay-at-home orders blocking access altogether. The campaign to frame abortion as a moral, not medical, issue began decades ago. The pandemic has revealed the broader stakes of this campaign — and what it might mean for access to care well after the worst of the pandemic is behind us.

For antiabortion leaders, there are obvious strategic reasons to insist that abortion is not health care. The stigma surrounding abortion is real and durable. Notwithstanding recent increases, many obstetric programs do not provide comprehensive abortion training (if they provide any training at all). A 2020 study in Plos One found that a majority of patients believed that they would be looked down upon “at least a little” for having had an abortion. This perceived stigma affects those refused abortions — and causes longer-term adverse mental health outcomes. Stigma has long been an effective tool for the antiabortion movement. The pandemic has done nothing to change that.

But, put in historical context, today’s effort to treat reproductive services as unessential means much more. That campaign is part of a broader agenda to undermine the idea of an autonomy-rooted abortion rights — and lay the groundwork for overturning Roe v. Wade.

What the Supreme Court’s ACA Ruling Might Mean for Nonprofit Hospitals

November 23, 2020November 19, 2020 The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Jacob Madden

California v. Texas, a pending Supreme Court case that concerns the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (ACA)’s individual mandate, could have profound implications for the standards to which nonprofit hospitals are held.

The ACA’s individual mandate requires people to have health insurance or otherwise pay a penalty. While the Court previously upheld the individual mandate as being constitutional under Congress’ taxation power in the 2012 case National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, it may not do so again. For one, the 2017 Trump tax cuts effectively eliminated the individual mandate’s penalty, raising the question of whether the individual mandate is still a valid exercise of Congress’ taxation power. And conservative Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation, filling the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat, has significantly changed the composition of the court.

If the Court strikes down the individual mandate, the rest of the ACA could be in jeopardy, depending on the specifics of the ruling. The Court has several options: sever the individual mandate from the ACA and keep the ACA alive, strike down the ACA in part, or strike down the ACA entirely.

The immediate concern, should the Court strike down the ACA entirely, is that tens of millions of Americans likely would lose their health insurance and other protections afforded by the law. Another, albeit lesser known concern, is that we would lose § 501(r).

Reproductive Rights vs. Reproductive Justice: Why the Difference Matters in Bioethics

November 3, 2020November 2, 2020 The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Danielle M. Pacia

When conceptualizing the pursuit of reproductive freedom, we must acknowledge the ways that our systems and structures fail Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) populations.

2020 has been a year filled with anxiety and anger over the COVID-19 pandemic’s disproportionate negative effects on BIPOC populations. Black Lives Matter protests after the unjust deaths of Breonna Taylor, Mia Green, George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, Riah Milton, and many others whose lives ended far too soon have prompted an overdue awakening. This has caused some to reexamine racism on a personal and institutional level. Like many disciplines in our country, the field of bioethics has begun to recognize how the field reinforces racism within its scholarship.

Part of this effort includes a critical examination of the frameworks we employ when analyzing bioethical subjects and events, and how they may exclude the historical contributions and narratives of BIPOC populations. Merely acknowledging racism is not enough.

Here, I will explain the differences in the terms reproductive justice and reproductive rights and advocate use of the reproductive justice framework instead of the reproductive rights framework. Within bioethics and health law policy, there is often a lack of clarity between the terms, which, in turn, leaves their important conceptual and historical differences ignored.

The Artifices of Corporate Speech: Video Preview with Nathan Cortez

October 26, 2020October 26, 2020 The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

The Health Law Policy, Bioethics, and Biotechnology Workshop provides a forum for discussion of new scholarship in these fields from the world’s leading experts.

The workshop is led by Professor I. Glenn Cohen, and presenters come from a wide range of disciplines and departments.

In this video, Nathan Cortez gives a preview of his paper, “The Artifices of Corporate Speech,” which he will present at the Health Law Policy workshop on October 26, 2020. Watch the full video below:

Tag: Supreme Court