medical – Overlawyered

An emergency bonfire of the regulations

Walter Olson — Thu, 19 Mar 2020 10:01:49 +0000

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.

Tags: banks, COVID-19 virus, disasters, free trade, HIPAA, hospitals, medical, occupational licensure, regulation and its reform

An emergency bonfire of the regulations is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

COVID-19 pandemic roundup

Walter Olson — Wed, 18 Mar 2020 10:05:00 +0000

“On free speech in and after pandemics, the United States demonstrates the right approach and China the wrong — in fact not just wrong but deadly.” [my new post at Cato]
“Can the Government Just Close My Favorite Bar?” [Keith Whittington on the “police power” in constitutional law; similarly Elizabeth Joh via libertarian legal scholar Randy Barnett]
“Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong have brought outbreaks under control — and without resorting to China’s draconian measures.” [Benjamin J. Cowling and Wey Wen Lim, New York Times]
“Stop It With the Coronavirus Curfews Already” [Matt Welch]
House-passed bill includes liability protection for medical mask makers [Michael Carroll, Legal Newsline; Steven Nelson, New York Post; earlier]
How to answer the glib one-liner “There are no libertarians in a pandemic”? [Bonnie Kristian, The Week; Keith Whittington] Turn it around: “There are only libertarians in a pandemic.” [Nick Gillespie]

Tags: China, constitutional law, COVID-19 virus, free speech, medical

COVID-19 pandemic roundup is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

COVID-19 pandemic roundup

Walter Olson — Fri, 13 Mar 2020 09:56:01 +0000

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]

Tags: COVID-19 virus, disasters, EEOC, First Amendment, free trade, hospitals, medical, public health

COVID-19 pandemic roundup is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

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

Walter Olson — Thu, 12 Mar 2020 10:01:43 +0000

“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!

Tags: China, COVID-19 virus, medical, public health, South Korea, WO writings

Regulators should get out of the way of broad COVID-19 testing is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

February 5 roundup

Walter Olson — Wed, 05 Feb 2020 10:59:36 +0000

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]

Tags: Canada, Donald Trump, international human rights, law schools, medical, regulation and its reform

February 5 roundup is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Tenure for doctors has its limits

Walter Olson — Sun, 27 Oct 2019 15:59:09 +0000

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]

Tags: employment at will, hospitals, medical, retaliation

Tenure for doctors has its limits is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Feds charge doc, medical consultant in mesh litigation scheme

Walter Olson — Thu, 13 Jun 2019 09:57:01 +0000

“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.

Tags: chasing clients, ethics, litigation finance, medical

Feds charge doc, medical consultant in mesh litigation scheme is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Medical roundup

Walter Olson — Mon, 13 May 2019 09:59:26 +0000

Why is insulin so expensive? [Tyler Cowen] “People Are Clamoring to Buy Old Insulin Pumps” [Sarah Zhang, The Atlantic via Ted Frank (calling it “an amazing story …about a problem created by overregulation and fear of tort liability, words that never appear in the article”)]
Opioid litigation might be working to let the policy offenders in government get away [Jeffrey Miron and Laura Nicolae, Real Clear Policy/Cato; Jeffrey Singer, Cato; Charles Fain Lehman, National Review] A contrasting view: Nicolas P. Terry, Petrie-Flom “Bill of Health”;
Read and marvel: Critical Dietetics, a social justice health movement [James Lindsay on Twitter]
How HIPAA, the health privacy law, impedes potentially life-saving research into health records [John Cochrane]
Uh-oh: Pennsylvania Supreme Court move could reopen forum shopping for medical malpractice lawsuits [David Wenner, Penn Live]
“Transparent Medical Pricing and the $89,000 Snake Bite” [Cato Podcast with Eric Ferguson]

Tags: HIPAA, illegal drugs, medical, opioids, Pennsylvania, pharmaceuticals

Medical roundup is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

“The Terrible Toll of the Kidney Shortage”

Walter Olson — Sun, 14 Apr 2019 15:58:57 +0000

“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).

Tags: medical

“The Terrible Toll of the Kidney Shortage” is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Medical roundup

Walter Olson — Fri, 08 Feb 2019 11:02:29 +0000

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]

Tags: Cuba, medical, opioids, pharmaceuticals, psychiatry, public health, sued if you do

Medical roundup is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system