Posts Tagged ‘medical’

An emergency bonfire of the regulations

So as to deploy medical services more effectively during the COVID-19 emergency, the Department of Health and Human Services has announced that it will forgo enforcement of rules restricting telemedicine, both by waiving HIPAA prohibitions on the use of everyday communications technologies like Skype and FaceTime, and by removing a requirement that reimburseable services be provided by the holder of an in-state license. At the same time, as I noted last week, many states have been relaxing rules prohibiting practice by out-of-state medical professionals (partial list here).

That’s part of a pattern in which governments are slashing many old regulations that they realize get in the way of crisis response and complicate the lives of ordinary citizens trying to work and shop under difficult conditions. My Cato colleague Chris Edwards links some of them in this post, including compilations by the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Americans for Tax Reform. (More: R Street Institute; Katherine Timpf, National Review. Hospitals and medical professionals aside, suspended rules include hours of service rules for truckers driving emergency medical supplies, requirements that Florida insurance agents keep public offices, rules forbidding the combined transport of food and liquor in Texas trucks, and federal standards restricting universities’ use of online classes. How many of these rules were unnecessary or unwise in the first place?

While movement of persons between communities may pose a danger during epidemics, movement of goods remains vital to prosperity and mutual exchange. Simon Lester points out in a Cato podcast that easing trade restrictions is a direct way to address difficult bottlenecks in emergency medical supplies. Relatedly, recent tariffs on medical supplies haven’t been helpful, encouraging large factories overseas to prioritize customers outside the U.S. (earlier).

In a reaction to the financial strains caused by the outbreak, the feds have been flooding the banking system with liquidity, both by relaxing regulations and through central bank operations. Cato’s Diego Zuluaga in a podcast distinguishes between liquidity objectives and (what is rightly more controversial) bailout objectives.

COVID-19 pandemic roundup

COVID-19 pandemic roundup

  • Certificate-of-need laws in 38 states restrict hospital bed capacity by giving competitors a lever to object. More beds would have helped with emergency preparedness [Jeffrey Singer; more from Eric Boehm; bed crisis feared within weeks]
  • White House, Congress negotiate on liability-limit measure aimed at freeing up 31 million expired but usable masks; “3M and Honeywell don’t feel comfortable providing them without assurances they won’t be sued.” [Michael Wilner, McClatchy; latest on HHS proclamation] Between death, business interruption, and enormous disruption to business practice, a landscape of litigation opens up [Bob Van Voris et al., Fortune]
  • Proposed executive order would bar import of critical medical supplies from China, closing supposed “loophole” that could save your loved one’s life as shortages of ventilators loom [Ana Swanson, New York Times; Greta Privitera, Politico Europe on triage decisions at Italian hospitals reeling under equipment shortages]
  • Courts canceling jury trials as virus spreads [Eric Turkewitz] Supreme Court building closes to public until further notice;
  • Newark, N.J. threatens to prosecute persons who make false statements about the pandemic [Mike Masnick, TechDirt (“a masterclass in how not to deal with the problem of misinformation about the coronavirus”); Eugene Volokh (while some kinds of lies can be criminalized consistent with the First Amendment, many of those relevant here cannot]
  • Memo to HR: EEOC has advised “that taking the temperature of all employees may violate the ADA under some circumstances, but has indicated that the rules may change during a pandemic” [Daniel Schwartz; employee temperature checks in Singapore]

Regulators should get out of the way of broad COVID-19 testing

“After suffering from the initial outbreak of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), China appears to have succeeded at turning around its spread through the use of highly coercive measures such as widespread home confinement of both healthy and sick persons. Can societies with more individual liberty match its success without losing their character?” My new Cato piece argues that widespread testing has been a key to South Korea’s success and if the United States is to follow up it needs to open up regulatory permissions. With bonus provocation at the end about Bill Gates and billionaires!

February 5 roundup

  • If your personal injury lawyer instructs you not to file a claim with your health insurer concerning your medical care, you may instead be in the hands of a “lien doctor” [Sara Randazzo, WSJ, paywall]
  • Supreme Court passes up opportunity to decide whether the Constitution’s Excessive Fines Clause applies to business defendants, and also whether a state can conjure an excessive fine out of existence by conceptually slicing it up into smaller daily fines [Ilya Shapiro on Cato support for certiorari petition in Dami Hospitality v. Colorado; petition denied January 13]
  • Assessing (favorably) the Trump Administration record on regulation [Cato Daily Podcast with William Yeatman and Caleb Brown; Casey Mulligan, Economics 21]
  • Twelve scholars pick their favorite dissents in Canadian law, and the result might furnish something of a mini-education in the jurisprudence of Canada, where unions, for example, are deemed to have a constitutional right to strike [Double Aspect via Prawfsblawg]
  • Ben Barton of the University of Tennessee, whose books we’ve much admired, has a new one out on a topic dear to our heart, called Fixing Law Schools [Scott Jaschik interview, Inside Higher Ed via Caron/TaxProf]
  • This, except not disapprovingly: current administration retreats from predecessor’s moves to define international human rights as including economic welfare and social justice claims [JoAnn Kamuf Ward and Catherine Coleman Flowers, Columbia Human Rights Law Review]

Tenure for doctors has its limits

From Institute for Justice’s Short Circuit newsletter: “How many times can an eye surgeon accidentally operate on the wrong eye before his surgical privileges are revoked? Three is the magic number at the Murfreesboro, Tenn. Veterans Affairs hospital. Sixth Circuit: And the revocation does not violate the due process of law.” [or constitute retaliation under employment discrimination law; Ahad v. Wilkie]

Feds charge doc, medical consultant in mesh litigation scheme

“Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have charged a physician and the owner of a medical consulting firm over a scheme to persuade women to have their pelvic mesh implants surgically removed to bolster the value of lawsuits against the devices’ manufacturers.” The prosecutors charge that the two lied to women about the health risks of mesh and of its surgical removal, and participated in a system of improper bribes and kickbacks. “The procedures were paid with money from high-interest cash advances arranged by a group of so-called litigation finance firms.” [Matthew Goldstein, New York Times, earlier on pelvic mesh here, here, here, etc.] More: Goldstein on suits by clients against lawyers.

Medical roundup

“The Terrible Toll of the Kidney Shortage”

“Many Americans die every year because they need kidney transplants, in large part due to federal laws banning organ sales. …an average of over 30,000 Americans have died each year, because the ban prevented them from getting transplants in time.” [Ilya Somin; Frank McCormick, Philip J. Held, and Glenn M. Chertow, Journal of the American Society of Nephrology] More: Michael Huemer (“I don’t know what ‘commodification’ is or why anyone should care about it. But it would have to be incredibly terrible to justify imposing death on people to prevent them from doing it.”); Emily Largent, Petrie-Flom “Bill of Health” (“unmet need for hearts, lungs, livers, and other vital organs” is also dire; “real-world test of regulated payments is needed”); Ike Brannon, Cato Regulation magazine (unneeded multivisceral transplants).

Medical roundup

  • Sued if you do, sued if you don’t: drugmaker faces lawsuits over failure to provide Fosamax warning that FDA told it not to provide [Jim Copland, James Beck on Merck Sharp & Dohme v. Albrecht, pending at Supreme Court]
  • On new APA masculinity guidelines, Sally Satel cuts to the point: will they improve the success of therapy for people seeking help? [Washington Post]
  • What does it mean to say the opioid litigation might follow the tobacco model? [Rob McKenna, U.S. Chamber] Citing fate of earlier gun lawsuit filed by city of Bridgeport, state judge dismisses four lawsuits filed by Connecticut cities against opioid industry [Daniel Fisher, Legal NewsLine]
  • I do miss the days when leaders of the public health profession focused on communicable diseases like typhus rather than running after Bloomberg grants to promote soda bans [Joel Grover and Amy Corral, NBC Los Angeles]
  • Cooking the books on infant mortality: about those Cuban life expectancy stats [David R. Henderson]
  • As artificial intelligence begins to make inroads into medical diagnosis, liability issues loom large [Beck, see related linked earlier]