Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Medical roundup

  • New ACA regulations from the feds restrict employer wellness programs [Jon Hyman; Leslie Francis, Bill of Health]
  • Frequent-flyer defense medical examiner comes to grief in New York [Eric Turkewitz]
  • Fecal transplants (that’s not a misprint) appear to hold out hope of saving a lot of lives, except for the mountain of FDA paperwork blocking them [Amar Toor/The Verge, Maggie Koerth-Baker] Enter the grey market [Beth Skwarecki]
  • Why can’t the FDA catch up with Europe on sunscreens? [Alex Tabarrok]
  • “The banning of catastrophic-only plans infuriates me the most…. the only plans that are actually financially sensible for a healthy individual to purchase.” [MargRev comments section]
  • More on the recent study of malpractice suits by a group of Johns Hopkins researchers [Christopher Robinette]
  • For all his public health pretensions, Michael Bloomberg “has no idea what he’s talking about” on medical marijuana [Jacob Sullum]
  • Another look at asylums? [James Panero, City Journal]
  • Feds’ war on Google pharma ads reflects no credit on D.C. [Brian Doherty]

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2 Comments

  • In the near future, fecal transplants and other microbiome transplants (eg, nasal) will be common, safe and inexpensive. It will no longer be gross when we stop focusing on the poop/snot and start focusing on the microbes: “Microbial Replacement Therapy” is benign and truthful. The time for the FDA to get out of the way of this important evolution in medical practice was about twenty years ago when doctors first started talking about it.

    Americans should be free to eat each others’ poop! or something like that.

  • The malpractice study puts forth that the gross injustice of malpractice litigation is OK because its cost is small compared to total costs. The researchers probably put in the costs of nursing homes into their total costs.

    Consider a bleak lottery where one person is chosen at random each weak for execution. That program would be relatively inexpensive, and there would be no measurable change in mortality rates. Such a lottery would pass muster with the John Hopkins’ folks. Good Grief.