HealthLawProf Blog

Worth Reading This Week

Ezekiel Emanuel & Jerry Menikoff, Reforming the Regulations Governing Research with Human Subjects, NEJM

Tim Greaney, The Affordable Care Act and Competition: Antidote or Placebo? SSRN/Oregon Law Review

Kate Greenwood, The Ban on 'Off-Label' Pharmaceutical Promotion: Constitutionally Permissible Prophylaxis Against False or Misleading Commercial Speech? SSRN/AJLM

John M. Golden, WARF's Stem Cell Patents and Tensions between Public and Private Sector Approaches to Research, SSRN/JLME

[NPT] 

 

IoM and the Device Industry

Interesting piece in the New York Times by Barry Meier, here, on the device industry's preemptive attack on an Institute of Medicine report prepared for the FDA. [NPT]

Millennium Goals and a Norwegian’s Cognitive Dissonance

This month, the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs released its Millennium Development Goals Report. It detailed how the international community was progressing towards its collective targets to address poverty, diseases, infant mortality, inequality, environmental harm and other problems set out in the Millennium Development Goals. While it acknowledges some progress in many areas, there is a long way to go:  

• The poorest children have made the slowest progress in terms of improved nutrition
• Opportunities for full and productive employment remain particularly slim for women
• Being poor, female or living in a conflict zone increases the probability that a child will be out of school
• Advances in sanitation often bypass the poor and those living in rural areas
• Improving the lives of a growing number of urban poor remains a monumental challenge
• Progress has been uneven in improving access to safe drinking water

The same day I read the report, I also viewed the appalling video “Knights Templar 2083” posted (but now deleted and I am unable to relocate it) by Anders Behring Breivik. The video complemented his manifesto, reported on here. As you may know, Breivik is the Norwegian right-winger who murdered 76 people in Oslo in order stop the Norwegian Labor Party from “driving its ideology” and “deconstructing Norwegian culture and mass-importing Muslims,” according to his reported statement in court. The video reveals the foundations of Breivik’s worldview: the supposed post-WWII institutionalization of Marxist views that is leading to the “deconstruction” of European culture though national governments and bodies like – you guessed it – the United Nations.  

All I can say is that I wish Breivik had been born in a developing country to a single mother suffering from AIDS, malnutrition, and a lack of access to clean water. Or had grown up in an indigenous community where the effects of colonization had wiped out most of his ancestors and deprived them of their lands. Then perhaps he would have really understood what cultural annihilation is all about, and even the role that white, Christian European men may have played in it. The response to his actions should not be fear; it needs to be renewed support for inclusive and compassionate programs that celebrate life and human dignity, programs that the Millennium Goals are designed to generate.

[MM]

Proposed Rulemaking for Regulations Governing Medical Research

Thanks to Ellen Fox at the VA for reporting that HHS has proposed major changes to the "Common Rule" that governs medical research on people. You can find the notice of the proposed changes at the HHS website. Ezekiel Emanuel and Jerry Menikoff have an article on the proposal in the New England Journal of Medicine.

[DO]

Worth Reading This Week

Nan Hunter, Health Insurance Reform and Intimations of Citizenship, SSRN/U.Pa. L.Rev.

Tim Greaney, Regulating to Promote Competition in Designing Health Insurance Exchanges, SSRN/Kansas Journal of Law & Public Policy

Orly Lobel & On Amir, Healthy Choices: Regulatory Design and Processing Modes of Health Decisions, SSRN

Eric Helland et al, Tort Liability and the Market for Prescription Drugs, SSRN

[NPT]