Prescription painkiller abuse is the fastest growing drug problem in the United States. In the past year, approximately one out of twenty Americans reported misuse or abuse of prescription painkillers. Several factors contribute to the prescription painkiller epidemic. Drug abusers use various methods—such as doctor shopping, paying with cash, and filling prescriptions in different states—t…
In Populations, Public Health and the Law, legal scholar Wendy Parmet urges courts to embrace population-based legal analysis, a public health inspired approach to legal reasoning. Parmet contends that population-based legal analysis offers a way to analyze legal issues—not unlike law and economics—as well as a set of values from which to critique contemporary legal discourse. Population-ba…
In Jimmo v. Sebelius, the plaintiffs alleged that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) regularly and improperly denied Medicare reimbursement for outpatient therapy treatment when the beneficiary did not show a likelihood of improvement. These denials, based on policy manuals and other guidance, appear to contradict the government’s own regulations, which specifically prohibit…
INTRODUCTION As of 2002, the Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had approved Neurontin, a drug developed by the pharm.aceutical company Pfizer, for two uses, the treatment of epilepsy and pain related to shingles. 1. A staggering ninety-four percent of Neurontin prescriptions in the prior five years, however, were for other (non-FDA) approved uses. 2.These other uses effectively trip…
There has been great debate about the potential labor market impact of the Affordable Care Act (“ACA” or “Obamacare”). Some have pointed to Massachusetts as the harbinger of what is to come nationally,1 while others have predicted massive dumping of employer-based insurance.2 An extension of this labor market debate was on full display during the summer of 2012.3 Critics seized on a McK…
This Note focuses on the medical loss ratio provision (“MLR Provision”) of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA).1 The MLR Provision states that health insurance companies must spend at least a certain percentage of their premium revenue on “activities that improve healthcare quality” (in other words, meet a minimum threshold medical loss ratio) and comply with reporting …
Today, health insurance is no longer simply a class of insurance that covers risks to health, and it has not been so for many years.argues that health insurance has become a unique form of insurance—a mechanism to pay for healthcare that uses risk spreading as one of several pricing methods.explains how the ACA builds on this important payment function to create a complex social insurance sys…
In a symposium1 focused on healthcare cost control, most of our authors have unsur prisingly highlighted and assessed Obamacare’s payment and delivery reforms—the supply-side efforts to decrease costs of medical treatment.2 But there is another party in healthcare decision-making who is equally or even more important: the patient. The question we will tackle here is whether the individual m…
Regenerative Sciences, LLC, a Colorado company run by physicians, created the Regenexx-C (Cultured) (“Regenexx-C”) procedure to treat bone pain. The procedure involves harvesting a patient’s own mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), expanding the cells ex vivo, and then injecting the resulting cellular product into the site of injury, usually an injured joint. 2 The MSCs then repair the damaged …