Upsolve Wins the Right to Give Basic Legal Advice
Thomas A. BerryTwo months ago, I wrote about a pathbreaking legal challenge aimed at expanding access to justice. The case was brought byUpsolve, a financial ‐​education and civil rights nonprofit. Upsolve currently helps low‐​income families file for bankruptcy for free, but it wants to do more. Upsolve wants to aid low‐​income individuals by helping them respond when they are sued for allegedly unpaid debts. To this end, Upsolve has (in its own words) trained “professionals who are not lawyers to provide free legal advice on whether and how to respond to a debt collection lawsuit. ” Th...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - June 1, 2022 Category: American Health Authors: Thomas A. Berry Source Type: blogs

Michigan Petition Fiasco Highlights Dysfunctional, Costly Ballot Access Laws
Andy CraigThe Michigan gubernatorial election is in turmoil after the state ’s Bureau of Elections determined that several Republican candidates submitted tens of thousands of invalid, fraudulent petition signatures. Thathas left many candidates, including the current frontrunner, short of the 15,000 signatures needed to appear on the primary ballot.This fiasco highlights America ’s problematic obsession with using high petitioning hurdles as barriers to ballot access. Unique among major democracies, many American states require thousands of signatures from eligible voters before a candidate can be placed on the ballot...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - May 24, 2022 Category: American Health Authors: Andy Craig Source Type: blogs

Friday Feature: Tennessee Education Savings Account Pilot Program
Colleen HroncichSome Tennessee families got good news this week with a state Supreme Court ruling on a new school choice option.In 2019, Tennessee enacted a targetededucation savings account (ESA) program aimed at students in the Metro Nashville and Memphis ‐​Shelby County school districts. The program would create accounts worth up to $7,300 per student to be used for approved educational expenses, such as tuition, transportation, and tutoring, for students who enroll in a private school. Only families earning less than 200 percent of the income limit for the federal free lunch program —about $67...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - May 20, 2022 Category: American Health Authors: Colleen Hroncich Source Type: blogs

Flu Is Making Comeback. Here ’s What We Can Do About It
Jeffrey A. SingerAfter being nearly absent in 2020 and 2021, influenza cases are making a comeback. In fact, cases are up ‐​tickingunusually late in the year. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)reported on April 15 that the majority of cases are H3N2, “antigenically different from the vaccine reference viruses.” This explains why the latest flu vaccine is only16 percent effective in reducing the chances of a moderate to severe infection. As of April 15, the CDC reported at least 4.3 million flu illnesses, 42,000 hospitalizations, and 2,500 deaths from the flu.Public health experts attribu...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - April 18, 2022 Category: American Health Authors: Jeffrey A. Singer Source Type: blogs

The emotional aspect of surviving a lawsuit or disciplinary action
Malpractice claims and disciplinary actions are unfortunate realities for too many physicians. A 2016 survey of physicians revealed that 34 percent of them had been sued, and 16.8 percent had been sued more than once. By the time a doctor is 54 years old, there is almost a 50 percent chance that they will haveRead more …The emotional aspect of surviving a lawsuit or disciplinary action originally appeared inKevinMD.com. (Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog)
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - April 11, 2022 Category: General Medicine Authors: < span itemprop="author" > < a href="https://www.kevinmd.com/post-author/vickie-mulkerin" rel="tag" > Vickie Mulkerin, MD < /a > < /span > Tags: Physician Malpractice Source Type: blogs

DoJ Joins False Claims Whistleblower Suit Against EHR Vendor Modernizing Medicine
The US Department of Justice has announced that it intends to join a whistleblower lawsuit filed against EHR vendor Modernizing Medicine and cofounder and CEO Daniel Cane. The suit alleges that the company engaged in serious violations of the False Claims Act and illegal kickbacks to physicians. The whistleblower in the case is Amanda Long, […] (Source: EMR and HIPAA)
Source: EMR and HIPAA - April 6, 2022 Category: Information Technology Authors: Anne Zieger Tags: Ambulatory Clinical EMR-EHR Health IT Company Healthcare IT Hospital - Health System Regulations CareCloud Daniel Cane eClinicalWorks EHR Anti-Kick Back EHR Certification EHR Whistleblower False Claims Litigation Modernizing Me Source Type: blogs

Contemplating Health Data Rights as Civil Rights
BY ERIC PERAKSLIS ON BEHALF OF THE LIGHT COLLECTIVE Recently, despite decades of experience in cybersecurity, privacy, and data science, I got sent back to school.   As a member of the Council of the Wise at the Light Collective, a patient advocacy group with a focus on healthcare technology and privacy, I attended a town hall event entitled “No Aggregation Without Representation,” which featured four eminently qualified leaders of the BIPOC and data advocacy communities: Dr Maya Rockeymore Cummings, Tiah Tomlin-Harris, Jillian Simmons, JD and Valencia Robinson. I was unprepared for the ownership and au...
Source: The Health Care Blog - March 25, 2022 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Ryan Bose-Roy Tags: Health Policy civil rights Healthcare data Source Type: blogs

More on why we Stay Alive
A couple of days ago I referred to the doubling of human life expectancy in 100 years, and the importance of pasteurization of milk in making that happen. Our next installment is about water. There ' s nothing more basic than good old H2O, but it used to kill city dwellers about as often as milk. People actually figured this out even before Pasteur and Koch came up with the germ theory of disease.Cholera is an intestinal infection caused by a bacterium called Vibrio cholera, which is spread through contaminated water or food. The disease causes severe diarrhea that can last for several days. Depending on the strain of bact...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 21, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs

Friday Feature: Clonlara School
Colleen HroncichTop o ’ the mornin’ to you!Since yesterday was St. Patrick ’s Day, it seemed like a good week to check outClonlara School, which is based in Michigan but named for a small village in Ireland.Clonlara was founded in 1967 by Pat Montgomery, a former public and private school teacher who wanted a different educational environment for her children. Shewanted to create“a school where children of all ages, ethnicities, and beliefs could learn and grow in an unhurried, relaxed atmosphere; where enrollment would be limited so that the children, staff, and parents would all get to know on...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - March 18, 2022 Category: American Health Authors: Colleen Hroncich Source Type: blogs

Facial Recognition Debate Lessons from Ukraine
Matthew Feeney and Rachel ChiuAccording toReuters, Ukrainian officials are using the facial recognition search engine Clearview AI to “uncover Russian assailants, combat misinformation and identify the dead.” In the United States, Clearview AI has made headlines in reporting on law enforcement, with civil liberties experts raising well‐​founded concerns about the proliferation of facial recognition technology (FRT) in poli ce departments. These concerns have prompted calls for the outrightban of facial recognition. Yet the Reuters article serves as a reminder that FRT has many applications beyond policing, and...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - March 17, 2022 Category: American Health Authors: Matthew Feeney, Rachel Chiu Source Type: blogs

Tackling trial delays, social inflation, and skeptical jurors in a pandemic world
More than one in three U.S. physicians will face a medical malpractice lawsuit in their careers. As the role of advanced practice clinicians such as nurse practitioners as primary caregivers continues to grow, so too will their exposure to medical malpractice litigation. Therefore, health care providers may benefit from staying versed in the following keyRead more …Tackling trial delays, social inflation, and skeptical jurors in a pandemic world originally appeared inKevinMD.com. (Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog)
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - March 14, 2022 Category: General Medicine Authors: < span itemprop="author" > < a href="https://www.kevinmd.com/post-author/marco-spadacenta" rel="tag" > Marco Spadacenta, JD < /a > < /span > Tags: Policy Malpractice Source Type: blogs

Freeze Peach
Michelle Mello, writing in the JAMA Health Forum, is frustrated that the Supreme Court considers vaccine disinformation to be protected under the first amendment.  As many as 12 million persons may have forgone COVID-19 vaccination in the US because of misinformation, resulting in anestimated 1200 excess hospitalizations and 300 deaths per day. If 5 fully loaded 747s crashed each week due to wrong information, regulators would be apoplectic. She points out that there are many circumstances in which potentially harmful falsehoods can be policed. This includes advertising -- an ad claiming that Ivermectin...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 11, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs

House Oversight Committee Leaders Ask GAO to Probe FBI Use of Assessments
Patrick G. EddingtonEarlier this week, Representatives Nancy Mace (R ‑SC) and Jamie Raskin (D‑MD) sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) requesting the congressional watchdog agency to investigate the FBI ’s use (or perhaps more accurately, misuse) of an investigative authority known as Assessments. Cato provided technical drafting assistance for the letter, as well as considerable background material on FBI Assessments obtained by Cato via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).In December 2008, then ‐​Attorney General Michael Mukasey modified the Attorney GeneralGuidelines for Domestic ...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - March 10, 2022 Category: American Health Authors: Patrick G. Eddington Source Type: blogs

What Entity or Person Serves As ABIM's "Restricted" Contributors?
 In late 2018 through 2020, The American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) was involved in a class action antitrust lawsuit for claims of illegal creation and maintenance of their monopoly power in the market for maintenance of certification (MOC). Even though there was an outpouring of physician s upport for the lawsuit from working physicians, the case did not survive massive legal efforts to (Source: Dr. Wes)
Source: Dr. Wes - February 25, 2022 Category: American Health Authors: DrWes Source Type: blogs

What Entity or Person Serves As ABIM's " Restricted " Contributors?
 In late 2018 through 2020, The American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) was involved in a class action antitrust lawsuit for claims of illegal creation and maintenance of their monopoly power in the market for maintenance of certification (MOC). Even though there was an outpouring of physician s upport for the lawsuit from working physicians, the case did not survive massive legal efforts to (Source: Dr. Wes)
Source: Dr. Wes - February 25, 2022 Category: American Health Authors: DrWes Source Type: blogs