Very few industries are as profoundly influenced by regulation as the pharmaceutical industry. All aspects of the life-cycle of new drugs are regulated, from patent application, to marketing approval, commercial exploitation, patent expiration and competition with generics. The nature of demand...

There are inadequate consumer protections from harmful medical billing practices that result in unavoidable, unexpected, and often financially devastating medical bills. The problem stems from increasing cost shifting to patients underway in American health care and the inordinate complexity...

This paper discusses the increased use of causation presumptions in workers' compensation cases involving firefighters and other first responders. It also considers increasing workers' compensation coverage of post traumatic stress disorder with respect to those same categories of workers.The...

Policymakers on both ends of the political spectrum have been looking for ways to reduce prescription drug prices. Democrats have also been working on expanding healthcare coverage, including different versions of Medicare for All. All these proposals have been framed as issues of access and...

Forty percent of spiraling US drug costs are based on a mere two percent of all drugs –biologic drugs (biologics) made from living cells that are administered by injection or infusion. These costs will continue to balloon as new biologics are approved; the recently approved Alzheimer’s drug is...

In 2018, California lawmakers sought to design and create a state Health Care Cost Transparency Database, an all-payer claims database (APCD), to collect information on the cost of health care in the state. The law tasks the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development (OSHPD) with...

Fair competition law and public health law talk past each other when discussing pharmaceutical pricing and distribution. The former cannot agree on the relevant definition of consumer welfare. The latter does not fully comprehend the highly complex but inherently collective nature of...

In the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Congress assumed that the private insurance sector will continue to underwrite health risks for most of the non-elderly population. But nothing requires private insurers to continue to do so. To the contrary, the burdensome nature of the ACA's provisions is...

For all intents and purposes, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare, has been fully implemented. And while much of the media coverage has been dominated by the technical failures of the program’s initial rollout, we are also learning much about the...

What most defines access to health care in the United States may be its stark inequity. Daily headlines in top newspapers paint the highs and lows. Articles entitled: “We Mapped the Uninsured. You’ll notice a Pattern: They tend to live in the South, and they tend to be poor” and op-eds...