- Wild scandal of Malibu rehab-center guru charged with alleged $176 million insurance fraud has roots in the artificial conditions imposed by federal law [Chris Edwards, Cato]
- “A new Trump executive order on kidneys could save thousands of lives” [Dylan Matthews/Vox via Alex Tabarrok]
- Advocates have long campaigned to change the law so as to allow medical malpractice suits by service members against the U.S. military. Are they getting close? [Roxana Tiron and Travis J. Tritten, Bloomberg Law; James Clark/Task & Purpose] New study of defensive medicine, extrapolated from data reflecting military immunity, finds “suggestive evidence that liability immunity reduces inpatient spending by 5 percent with no measurable negative effect on patient outcomes.” [Michael Frakes and Jonathan Gruber, American Economic Journal via Scott Sumner]
- Meanwhile, said to be new record: Baltimore jury awards $229 million in claim of obstetric brain injury that Johns Hopkins says is “not supported by the evidence” [Tim Prudente, Baltimore Sun via Saurabh Jha (“My guess is that this verdict won’t reduce the frequency of C-sections in the US”)] “Best & Worst States for Doctors” [John S. Kiernan, WalletHub]
- It might not always improve outcomes in a hard science like medicine to rethink every issue through an “equity lens.” Case in point: differing male and female rates of heart disease [Anish Koka, Quillette]
- “Medical Malpractice Reform: What Works and What Doesn’t” [W. Kip Viscusi, forthcoming Denver Law Review]
Posts Tagged ‘defensive medicine’
Medical roundup
- “Researchers from Duke and MIT… found that the possibility of a lawsuit increased the intensity of health care that patients received in the hospital by about 5 percent — and that those patients who got the extra care were no better off.” [Margot Sanger-Katz, New York Times]
- Cato Policy Analysis and podcasts (with Caleb Brown) by Terence Kealey: “The Feds’ Demonization of Dietary Fat” and “Why Does the Federal Government Issue Damaging Dietary Guidelines?” Related: Britain’s “food supply is being taxed, regulated and reformulated – on the pretext of a lie” [Christopher Snowdon, Spectator (U.K.)]
- New Jersey, a key state because of its volume of pharmaceutical liability litigation, joins national trend by adopting Daubert standard on expert evidence [Colleen O’Dea/N.J. Spotlight, Beck, John O’Brien/Legal NewsLine]
- “Criminal prosecution for violating HIPAA: an emerging threat to health care professionals” [Anne M. Murphy, Laura B. Angelini, and Jared Shwartz, STAT]
- Do-it-yourself workarounds for obtaining compounds blocked or restricted by FDA/pharma regulation, albeit entangled with IP issues. With bonus code-as-speech angle [Daniel Oberhaus, Vice Motherboard]
- “Hotels do want to tell you the real price. Until hospitals do too, they will find their way around disclosure regulations” [John Cochrane; related Cochrane on lack of price competition among air ambulances]
I join Dr. Saurabh Jha to discuss law, medicine, and American tort history
A noteworthy podcast: I join Dr. Saurabh Jha [@RogueRad on Twitter] for an lengthy discussion of how American tort and medical malpractice law has changed over the past century, similarities and differences with Britain, how ethics in the legal field stacks up against ethical trends in medicine and the pharmaceutical business, contingency fees, the successes and shortcomings of legislated tort reform, trends in the courts, incentives for medical testing, and much more. It’s all part of Dr. Jha’s podcast series, associated with the Journal of the American College of Radiology. You can listen here.
Medical roundup
- After malpractice caps, doctors ordered fewer invasive tests to diagnose heart attacks [Elizabeth Cooney, Stat]
- Product liability defense lawyer manages to survive peremptory challenge and make it onto a jury for a med-mal case, and here are his observations [Stephen McConnell, Drug & Device Law]
- “How Big Government Backed Bad Science and Made Americans Fat” [Reason interview with Nina Teicholz]
- Suits against blood thinner Xarelto have done poorly. Can plaintiff’s lawyers keep plugging away till they get wins? [John O’Brien, Legal NewsLine]
- “Pharmacy Benefit Managers Are Not the Cause of High Prescription Drug Prices” [Ike Brannon]
- Advice for physicians: “5 ways to live through medical malpractice lawsuits” [Stacia Dearmin, KevinMD]
Medical roundup
- States that are best at deploying coercive public health laws are also generally unable to resist meddling of other sorts [Werner Troesken via Vincent Geloso, Notes on Liberty]
- Artificial intelligence in medical practice could help curb defensive medicine — if the law cooperates [Shailin Thomas]
- “How Two Florida Hospitals Used the Power of the State to Stop Another From Being Built” [Eric Boehm, Reason]
- Organ transplants and the right to try [Sally Satel, Volokh/AEI]
- “Stronger malpractice laws may not prevent surgical complications” [Reuters/Fox News]
- State attorney general intervention and drug prices [Marc Kilmer/Maryland Public Policy Institute, Dan Menefee/Maryland Reporter]
Medical roundup
- U.S. Surgeon General’s office, WHO campaign against vaping, e-cigarettes. Lessons of harm reduction forgotten [Jacob Sullum, Jonathan Adler, Todd Krainin]
- Plenty of other hospitals are willing to do this surgery. Catholic facilities should have conscience right to refuse [AP/NJ.com on St. Joseph’s Regional Medical Center case, Stephen Miller/IGF]
- Study: states with stronger physician protection from malpractice suits had lower usage of imaging tests [Radiology Business on Suhui Li et al., Journal of the American College of Radiology]
- Hospitals that require employees to take flu shots to protect patients and others may pay dearly if they’re stingy with the religious exemptions [Jon Hyman]
- “Maybe For-Profit Hospitals Aren’t So Bad” [Shailin Thomas, Harvard “Bill of Health”]
- “New Study Finds 90% of California Pharmaceutical Plaintiffs are from Other States” [U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform on Mark Behrens study for CJAC]
Medical roundup
- Med mal something of a regional problem: nearly half of payouts are in Northeast, with New York alone paying out more than the entire Midwest [New Jersey Civil Justice Institute on Diederich Healthcare analysis] “Neurosurgeons were 50% more likely to practice defensive medicine in high-risk states compared with low-risk states” [Smith et al., Neurosurgery via NJCJI]
- New Paul Nolette book on state attorneys general Federalism On Trial includes history of suits led by New York’s Eliot Spitzer to redefine as “fraud” widely known drug-pricing practices that Congress had declined to ban or otherwise address. The resulting lucrative settlements also earmarked money to fund private critics of the pharmaceutical industry;
- City of Chicago signs on to one of the trial bar’s big current recruitment campaigns, suits seeking recoupment of costs of dealing with prescription opioid abuse [Drug & Device Law; earlier here, here, here]
- We here in Washington, D.C. take very seriously any violations of HIPAA, the health privacy law. Just kidding! If a union supporter pulls information from an employee medical database to help in an organizing drive, that might be overlooked [Jon Hyman on National Labor Relations Board administrative law judge decision in Rocky Mountain Eye Center]
- “Preferred Care defendants respond to New Mexico Attorney General’s lawsuit, argue it was filed at urging of Cohen Milstein law firm” [Legal NewsLine]
- Philadelphia police run warrant checks of hospital visitor lists, and as a result many persons with outstanding warrants avoid going to hospitals. So asserts sociologist Alice Goffman in her book On the Run, but the evidence is disputed [Sara Mayeux last August, Steven Lubet in review challenging the book more broadly on ethical and factual grounds, Goffman’s response]
- Making contraceptive pill available over the counter without prescription should please supporters of birth control access, right? Funny you should ask [Elizabeth Nolan Brown, Reason, earlier]
Anti-drug-overdose compound could save lives…
…but counsel for the Maryland State Medical Society told a panel in Annapolis that doctors fear liability should they prescribe it. In recent years police and first responders have increasingly been trained in the use of the emergency drug Naloxone, which counteracts overdoses from heroin and opiates, and a proposed bill would allow physicians to prescribe the substance to users, family members, and others who might intervene in case of an overdose. [Rebecca Lessner, Maryland Reporter]
George Tolley, representing the Maryland Association of Justice, a trial lawyers group, asked that the immunity provision be taken out of the bill, over a concern that it would have “a domino effect” and could impact people administering other emergency drugs, such as for epilepsy and diabetes.
“If (doctors) exercise reasonable care, then they cannot be sued,” Tolley said.
Bill Sponsor Sen. Katherine Klausmeier, D-Baltimore County, responded “That’s the crux of this whole bill.”
Medical roundup
- Down comes the pediatrician’s wall of baby pictures, another HIPAA casualty [Anemona Hartocollis/NY Times, resulting letters to the editor, earlier, NPR with somewhat different slant]
- Had the Washington Post stayed on story of Maryland health exchange fiasco, it might have held power to account [my Free State Notes]
- FDA rules requiring that certain drugs be kept out of hands of anyone but patients may inadvertently establish monopoly for some off-patent compounds [Derek Lowe via Alex Tabarrok]
- Richard Epstein argues Hobby Lobby right result, wrong reasoning [new Cato Supreme Court Review, more]
- Defensive medicine: so much easier to go ahead and order the ultrasound [White Coat]
- Fate of melanoma-scanning device and the FDA [Alex Tabarrok via Elizabeth Nolan Brown] Can agency learn from European private certification? [more]
- Seredipitous offshoot of study on rats helped premature infants; but would this have been quite as likely to appear in HuffPo if framed as “what we owe lab-animal research” rather than “what we owe federal research”? [Sam Stein; related, first volunteer given new trial Ebola vaccine, and a hat tip to lab-animal research on that too [Wellcome, U.K.]
Medical roundup
- ObamaCare challenge: D.C. Circuit vacates Halbig decision for en banc rehearing [Roger Pilon, earlier]
- ACLU and SEIU California affiliates oppose trial lawyers’ higher-damages-plus-drug-testing Proposition 46 [No On 46, earlier] As does Sacramento Bee in an editorial;
- Rethinking the use of patient restraints in hospitals [Ravi Parikh, Atlantic; legal fears not mentioned, however]
- Certificate of need regulation: “I didn’t know the state of Illinois had a standard for the maximum permissible size of a hospital room.” [John Cochrane]
- In China, according to a study by Benjamin Liebman of Columbia Law School, hired malpractice mobs “consistently extract more money from hospitals than legal proceedings do” [Christopher Beam, The New Yorker]
- Overview of (private-lawyer-driven) municipal suits on painkiller marketing [John Schwartz, New York Times, earlier] More: Chicago’s contingency deal with Cohen Milstein on opioid lawsuit [LNL] More: Rob Green, Abnormal Use.
- “So In The End, The VA Was Rewarded, Not Punished” [Coyote]