Glenn Cohen

Harvard Law Professor Glenn Cohen, who co-wrote the argument against the ban on gay male blood donation in the Journal of the American Medical Association, joins Andrea Mitchell to discuss the 26th annual World AIDS Day.

The federal government is on the brink of lifting restrictions put in place more than three decades ago when regulators, alarmed by the spread of the virus that causes AIDS, barred men who had sex with other men from donating blood. A Food and Drug Administration advisory panel will begin a two-day meeting on the issue Tuesday, amid growing calls from medical groups, gay rights activists and lawmakers to jettison the ban as outdated and discriminatory...“They really are out of step with the rest of the world,” said Glenn Cohen, a Harvard Law School professor who with two colleagues recently argued in the Journal of the American Medical Association for a new U.S. policy. Cohen noted that numerous countries have abandoned blanket bans and put in place shorter deferral periods.

When most people hear the word “tourism,” they immediately think of flocking to the sandy beaches of the Caribbean or exploring museums in a European city. For Harvard Law School graduate I. Glenn Cohen, the word has a different implication: travelling to another country for medical treatment. The now-Law School professor discussed this phenomenon, called medical tourism, and his new book, “Patients with Passports: Medical Tourism, Law, and Ethics,” on Wednesday afternoon. Cohen was joined by three other panelists—Kennedy School of Government professor Amitabh Chandra, School of Public Health professor Alicia Ely Yamin, and Medical School professor Nir Eyal—for a discussion of medical tourism and its implications.

Many readers were shocked by my recent article about Peter Drier, who received a surprise bill of $117,000 from an out-of-network assistant surgeon who helped out during his back operation. But almost as surprising was how difficult it was during my reporting for Mr. Drier to extract his own records from the hospital...“You should be able to walk into a provider’s office and say, ‘I want a copy’ — you are legally entitled to that,” said I. Glenn Cohen, a professor at Harvard Law School, noting that there were only a few exceptions, such as for prisoners. But the reality is that many hospitals and doctors have created a series of hurdles that must be cleared before patients can get their information. And many of those hurdles, experts say, are based on the economics of medicine...“The medical record is held hostage,” Professor Cohen said. “The reason is often to keep a customer or keep a patient from leaving the practice.”

The aid-in-dying movement may be enjoying a boost from the purposeful death of beautiful 29-year-old Brittany Maynard, but another case across the ocean is emerging as "political kryptonite" — a British mom’s court-backed decision to end her disabled child’s life. ...“Many groups pushing for more end of life options find these kinds of cases to be political kryptonite and want to be able to say ‘that's totally different, not the thing we are talking about,’" said Glenn Cohen, director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. “My own sense is that Compassion and Choices and other pro-assisted-suicide legislation groups will only push for (domestic) legislation to govern cases like these once political victories are more secure in the more typical case they are interested in,” Cohen said.

When I. Glenn Cohen, a professor at Harvard Law School and director of a bioethics center there, helped to organize a conference in 2012 about the future of research on human subjects, he says he worried about being "late to the party." In 2011, the Department of Health and Human Services had floated some ideas for changes in the rules governing such research. The aim was both to better protect the subjects and to reduce the much-resented bureaucratic burden on professors and university staff members. Mr. Cohen needn’t have worried about tardiness. Today, more than two years after the conference, the regulations remain just where they were in 2011: still under development.

Far from the global glare on Brittany Maynard, physicians across America are risking prison by covertly helping terminally ill people end their lives via lethal overdoses, asserts a leading “death-with-dignity” advocate...Indeed, one of the three choices for terminally ill Americans seeking a physician’s aid to end their lives is to “get illegal assistance in your home states,” said I. Glenn Cohen, director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. The other two options, according to Cohen: Move to a state like Oregon where the practice is legal, or travel to Switzerland, where assisted-suicide is legal and where no residency is required.

Facebook and Apple will offer employees the medical option of freezing their eggs. Supporters say the perk will empower women in the workplace, while critics argue delaying childbirth isn't the answer to lowering the glass ceiling...Guests: I. Glenn Cohen @CohenProf (Cambridge, MA) Co-director, Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, & Bioethics

Picture a hospital where patients input information about their current conditions on tablets in the waiting room. During the examination, doctor and patient talk about the patient’s hobby of biking. He would like to continue it, but his speeds are slowing down because of knee pain, as the doctor can see from the data he uploaded from his personal fitness tracker into his health record...“No one ever thought your doctor needed explicit consent before he could talk about your case with a colleague,” [Glenn] Cohen says. Yet, this learning from past experience is about to happen on a larger scale with big data, and it’s presenting sticky legal issues.

As enrollment for next year's health benefits goes on in work places around the United States, Apple and Facebook say they're willing to pay for employees to freeze their eggs...Glenn Cohen, a professor at Harvard Law School and an expert in the intersection of bioethics and law, said the perk could be perceived in several different lights. "The good is that it empowers women and gives them more choices they might not have afforded otherwise," Cohen told ABC News. "The bad is it communicates a message to women that their workplaces may not be tolerant to women who decide to have children on the job and potentially also has more women undergoing a procedure that carries risks that they might not in the end need."

Two Silicon Valley giants now offer women a game-changing perk: Apple and Facebook will pay for employees to freeze their eggs...“Would potential female associates welcome this option knowing that they can work hard early on and still reproduce, if they so desire, later on?” asked Glenn Cohen, co-director of Harvard Law School’s Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics, in a blog post last year. “Or would they take this as a signal that the firm thinks that working there as an associate and pregnancy are incompatible?”

Tens of thousands of mental patients and troops unknowingly became malaria test subjects during the 1940s — part of a secret federal rush to cure a dread disease and win a world war, according to a book published Tuesday that exposes vast, previously unknown breaches of medical ethics...“The Malaria Project” — operating via the same covert White House machinery that drove the Manhattan Project — tasked doctors with removing malaria from naturally exposed U.S. troops then injecting those strains into people with syphilis and schizophrenia, reports author Karen Masterson, who researched files at the National Archives...“There are no easy answers,” agreed I. Glenn Cohen, a Harvard Law School professor specializing in medical ethics. "But in trying to reach an answer on a particular case, here is how I look at it: avoid hindsight bias; determine whether the study violated contemporaneous research ethics rules not whether it offends our current understandings," Cohen said. "In this case, it likely violated even contemporaneous rules."

…Alexander “AJ” Betts Jr. attempted suicide in July 2013, the Des Moines Register reported at the time. He died shortly thereafter. Betts’s mother said he had been outed as gay about a year and half before his death.…Before he died, Betts had a request: Donate my organs. A 14-year-old boy received Betts’s heart, according to a letter Moore received, but she said his eyes were rejected…In the Journal of the American Medical Association, Glenn Cohen, a bioethics law professor at the Harvard Law School, wrote that the United States should repeal the rules about blood. “We think it’s time for the FDA to take a serious look at this policy, because it’s out of step with peer countries, it’s out of step with modern medicine, it’s out of step with public opinion, and we feel it may be legally problematic,” he told CBS. Cohen notes some contradictions in the FDA blood ban: Men who have sex with HIV-positive women or sex workers are banned for only a year.

Despite including a tax, Obamacare doesn’t violate the Constitution’s requirement that all tax bills originate in the House of Representatives, a key appeals court said Tuesday in a ruling that gives the Obama administration a health care win before the courts…Legal scholars say origination clause challenges, historically, have been a tough sell in the courts. Indeed, it is “very rarely litigated,” said I. Glenn Cohen, a health expert at Harvard Law School who said “it has only been considered by the U.S. Supreme Court a handful of times.”

An op-ed by Nathan G. Cortez, I. Glenn Cohen, and Aaron S. Kesselheim. Medicine may stand at the cusp of a mobile transformation. Mobile health, or “mHealth,” is the use of portable devices such as smartphones and tablets for medical purposes, including diagnosis, treatment, or support of general health and well-being…However, mHealth has also become a challenge for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the regulator responsible for ensuring that medical devices are safe and effective. The FDA's oversight of mHealth devices has been controversial to members of Congress and industry,10 who worry that “applying a complex regulatory framework could inhibit future growth and innovation in this promising market.”11 But such oversight has become increasingly important.

Millions of Americans are not entitled to government health insurance subsidies under Obamacare because of the way the law is written, a divided three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday…Court rules allow any active member of the appeals court to vote for an en banc hearing, according to I. Glenn Cohen, a professor at Harvard Law School. “There is nothing in the rules that say that people who were confirmed after the decision was taken up but before it was issued do not get to sit, so I imagine it means the now-Democrat stacked group will vote for en banc rehearing,” he said.

Gay marriage laws and court rulings against sexual-orientation discrimination are all signs that it’s time for the federal government to change its blood-donor policy for gay and bisexual men, authors said in a commentary released Saturday. The lifetime ban for blood donation by men who have sex with men (MSM) “may be perpetuating outdated homophobic perceptions,” wrote Dr. Eli Y. Adashi of Brown University and scholars I. Glenn Cohen and Jeremy Feigenbaum, both of Harvard Law School, in the July 23/30 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

By Glenn Cohen and Adam Teicholz. Before dawn on a Wednesday in January, Cesar Flores, a 40-year-old employed by a large retail chain, woke up at his home in Chula Vista, California. He got in his car and crossed the border into Tijuana. From there, he headed for a local hospital, where he got lab tests—part of routine follow-up to a kidney stone procedure. He had his blood drawn and left the hospital at 7:30. He arrived home before 10. Uninsured Americans have long known that seeking medical care abroad is often more cost-effective than seeking it at home…But Flores’s situation isn’t medical tourism as we know it. Flores has insurance through his wife’s employer. But his insurer, a small, three-year-old startup H.M.O. called MediExcel, requires Flores to obtain certain medical treatment at a hospital across the border.

By I. Glenn Cohen, Ruben Amarasingham, Anand Shah, Bin Xie and Bernard Lo. Predictive analytics, or the use of electronic algorithms to forecast future events in real time, makes it possible to harness the power of big data to improve the health of patients and lower the cost of health care. However, this opportunity raises policy, ethical, and legal challenges.

Facebook isn’t the only company that wants to capitalize on information collected from millions of people do do research. Health care systems want to use…