WashU Expert: EpiPen controversy highlights need for price controls
Recent scandals involving high-priced generic drugs should prompt us to consider price controls for pharmaceutical companies, says an expert on the health care industry at the School of Law at Washington University.
New opt-out proposal a ‘live and let live solution’ for contraception mandate
The Obama administration has proposed letting
religiously affiliated non-profit businesses and institutions opt-out of
the contraceptive mandate of the Affordable Care Act. “The Obama
administration has bent over backward to accommodate the concerns of
some religiously affiliated businesses,” says Elizabeth Sepper, JD,
health law expert and professor of law at Washington University In St.
Louis.
Who pays? The wage-insurance trade-off and corporate religious freedom claims
Corporations’ religious freedom claims against the
Affordable Care Act’s contraception coverage mandate miss a “basic fact
of health economics: health insurance, like wages, is compensation that
belongs to the employee,” says Elizabeth Sepper, JD, health law expert
and associate professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis.
Sepper’s scholarship explores the interaction of morality, professional
ethics, and law in medicine.
Conscience legislation ignores medical providers committed to giving patients all necessary care
Advances in medicine allow doctors to keep patients
alive longer, tackle fertility problems and extend the viability of
premature babies. They also lead to a growing number of moral questions
for both the medical provider and patient. “Across the country,
so-called conscience legislation allows doctors and nurses to refuse to
provide abortions, contraception, sterilizations, and end-of-life care,”
says Elizabeth Sepper, JD, health law expert and professor of law at
Washington University in St. Louis. “But legislators have totally
overlooked the consciences of providers who have made the conscientious
judgment to deliver care and of the patients who seek these treatments.” Sepper says that conscience in the medical setting needs to be protected more consistently. “The
one-sided protection of refusal cannot stand,” she says. “Just as we
wouldn’t say that giving students vouchers only for Christian schools
furthers religious freedom, we can’t say that current conscience
legislation successfully lives up to its goal of protecting conscience.