Read this recent report by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Loss of life and injuries from vehicle crashes go way beyond measurement in purely economic terms, but the economic losses (including the lost of quality life measured in economic terms) associated with crashes are very large: about $870 billion in the most recent year […]
Author Archives: Brian Wolfman
In 2009, Congress for the first time gave the Food and Drug Administration authority to regulate tobacco. In April 2014, the agency proposed to regulate e-cigarettes and similar products. In a short paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association entitled E-Cigarettes, Vaping, and Youth, Larry Gostin and Aliza Glasner have provided their views on […]
by Brian Wolfman Take a close look at this story about a new CNN poll. The first thing you see is this: So, it looks like 59% oppose the ACA and only 40% support it. If you are an ACA supporter that doesn't sound very good, though it's up from December 2013, when the numbers […]
Remember the 80-20 rule (also known as the medical loss ratio rule)? That's the Affordable Care Act rule that generally requires health insurers to spend 80% or more on hospitals, docs, prescription drugs, and the like (that is, actual health care) — and not administrative expenses and advertising. The idea is to encourage insurers to […]
A recent study by Myungho Paik, Bernard Black, and David Hyman finds a significant downward effect from state-law medical-malpractice caps on claim rates and payouts. Here is the abstract: We study the effect of damage caps adopted in the 1990s and 2000s on medical malpractice claim rates and payouts. Prior studies found some evidence that […]
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been taking consumer complaints on a wide range of topics for some time now, including mortgage lending, credit reporting, private students, and (more recently) debt collection. The agency announced today that it is now taking complaints concerning prepaid cards and other nonbank products. Here is the agency's press release: […]
We have been providing reports (go, for instance, here) of evidence that the number of Americans lacking health insurance has been dropping as the Affordable Care Act goes into effect. Here is the latest: State insurance officials [in Washington state] say fewer than 9 percent of Washington residents still don't have health insurance. That's a significant […]
Is off-label drug promotion–promotion of drugs for uses other than those approved by the FDA — good, bad, or something in between? What can the FDA do to curb off-label promotion by drug sellers consistent with the First Amendment? Law professors Stephanie Greene and Lars Noah have recently debated the issue in writing in Off-Label […]
Professors Eric Fink and Roland Zullo have written Federal Student Loan Servicing: Contract Problems and Public Solutions Here is the abstract: One consequence of the 2007-2008 financial crisis was an abrupt shift from bank-based to direct federal student loans. This momentous change required the Department of Education to rapidly establish the capacity to service loans, […]
That's the title of this piece by Steven Davidoff Simon. The piece describes how the American Apparel company hid sexual harrasment through a pre-dispute mandatory arbitration clause that it forced on its employees. Hat tip to Paul Bland.