Until Next Year

It’s been our great pleasure to collaborate with the Health Affairs Blog on this series stemming from the Third Annual Health Law Year in P/Review symposium at Harvard Law School. This annual event takes a look back over the prior year and previews the year to come with regard to hot topics in health law.

After the symposium, we asked our speakers to keep the conversation going online by expanding on their topics from different angles or by honing in on particularly intriguing features. These pieces were published on the Health Affairs Blog through the spring and into summer.

We heard more from Kevin Outterson on how to promote innovation in the development of new antibiotics, from Rachel Sachs on whether the Food and Drug Administration’s proposal to regulate laboratory-developed tests will really stifle innovation, and from Claire Laporte on the impact of recent Supreme Court decisions on bio-IP.

George Annas weighed in on the Ebola outbreak, which has already almost faded from public consciousness but offers important public health lessons, while Wendy Parmet and Andrew Sussman tackled important developments in tobacco control.

The medical profession itself was also scrutinized, by Charles Baron and his exploration of physician aid-in-dying in light of the Brittany Maynard story, as well as by I. Glenn Cohen, who assessed the problems posed by the medicalization of capital punishment. In her post, Millie Solomon offered some guidance as to how to best regulate research in learning health systems given challenges to the traditional research ethics oversight paradigm.

On the Affordable Care Act front, Christopher Robertson and Tony Caldwell discussed and critiqued the development of the Open Payments database prompted by the ACA, which collects information about the financial relationships between medical drug and device manufacturers, physicians, and teaching hospitals.

Holly Fernandez Lynch evaluated the growth and development of new state-level Religious Freedom Restoration Acts after the Hobby Lobby case and their potential implications for health care, while Matthew J.B. Lawrence explored the significant state-to-state variation in marketplace enrollment and Kristin Madison assessed the ways in which the ACA’s encouragement of employee wellness programs interacts with protections from the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Finally, Massachusetts State Representative Jeffrey Sánchez, House Chair of the Joint Committee on Health Care Financing, provided an update on ongoing efforts to reform MassHealth, the state’s Medicaid program. A few other topics can be viewed as videos.

Of course, this is just a smattering of the many hot topics in health law policy that are keeping those of us in the field busy these days. There are also pressing issues regarding childhood vaccinations, obesity, gun violence, organ and blood donation, reproductive technologies, human subjects research regulation, genetics and neuroscience, and of course health care finance, among many, many others. In other words, we’ve just scratched the surface in our one-day event and short blog run.

But that’s okay. The Fourth Annual Health Law Year in P/Review is already on the horizon. Our old friend the Affordable Care Act (aka the Full Employment Act for Health Lawyers) will surely make yet another appearance as it progresses along its staged implementation — and novel litigation strategies continue to be tested.

Perhaps we will also have a revised set of draft regulations for human subjects research to ponder over the next year, if the whispers about a Notice of Proposed Rule Making to amend the Common Rule are indeed true. There will surely be compelling issues surrounding medical marijuana, “right-to-try” laws and policies, definitions of death, and aid-in-dying, as well as a range of other topics, such as privacy and big data, the impact of racial disparities on health, immigrant health and health care, and innovation policy, not to mention several others.

One thing is for sure — every year in health law has proven more interesting than the last, and we are sure this one will be no exception. We hope you will join us for the January 2016 Health Law Year in P/Review.

The Health Law Year in P/Review is a collaboration between the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics and the New England Journal of Medicine, and in 2015 was co-sponsored by Health Affairs, The Hastings Center, and the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School.