Glenn Cohen

Sen Orrin G. Hatch wants to see the Supreme Court strike a blow to Obamacare this year--but the Utah Republican's own words are being used by the Obama administration in that court case to defend the law...In cases like these, it is fairly common for interested parties to "use whatever they can to flavor their arguments in the briefs," said I. Glenn Cohen, a health law expert at Harvard Law School. But that doesn't mean the justices will tune in. "All the justices will focus on the text itself, and while a few may look at legislative history, I would be quite surprised if media comments are used as anything but a rhetorical device in the opinions," Mr. Cohen said.

The fight over greater regulation of abortion is swinging once again to the federal courts, where challenges to recent state laws are producing a patchwork of contradictory rulings that may eventually reach the Supreme Court...“I think the fate of the undue burden standard is really being debated and discussed in the courts right before our eyes and seems ripe for a Supreme Court review,” said Gretchen Borchelt, state policy director for the National Women’s Law Center. [Glenn] Cohen, co-director of Harvard Law’s Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics, concurs. “The notion of when something becomes an undue burden is extremely vague,” he said.

Glenn Cohen, a Harvard Law professor who wrote about the blood donor rule in JAMA: the Journal of the American Medical Association, sees a one-year deferral as an interim step, but thinks it's not any more evidence-based than the current lifetime ban. "There's no medical reason to think that a one-year deferral makes a difference as opposed to a month-long deferral when the virus would show up in blood," he explained. Cohen says these long deferrals on gay and bi men are a hangover from the early days of HIV, when the disease was known as GRID, or "gay-related immune deficiency." But maybe an evidence-based blood policy is too much to ask for when fears about gay men's blood still abound. "It's not just about the safety of the blood supply," Cohen said, "it's about the perceived safety of the blood supply."

The Food and Drug Administration announced on Tuesday that it would scrap a decades-old lifetime prohibition on blood donation by gay and bisexual men, a change that experts said was long overdue and could lift the annual blood supply by as much as 4 percent...“This is a major victory for gay civil rights,” said I. Glenn Cohen, a law professor at Harvard University who specializes in bioethics and health. “We’re leaving behind the old view that every gay man is a potential infection source." He said, however, that the policy was “still not rational enough."

All-inclusive vacations might feature a stay in a luxury hotel, gourmet meals, and in some cases, a hip replacement. Companies that specialize in medical tourism help patients in the U.S. find health care opportunities abroad, often at greatly reduced costs. This hour, we’ll talk about why a million Americans each year travel overseas for medical care and the legal and ethical gray areas of this growing trend. Guests: Glenn Cohen, professor of law and bioethics at Harvard, author of “Patients with Passports: Medical Tourism, Law and Ethics”.

...Ms. Andersen's daughter will arrive shortly after the family joined Medi-Share, a type of health coverage little known in New York but common in the Bible Belt. Christian health-care-sharing ministries are nonprofit cooperatives that mimic health-insurance companies...The model offers no consumer protections, critics charge. Courts in some states have ruled that health-care-sharing ministries can operate as long as they make it abundantly clear that they do not guarantee that members' medical bills will be paid. "These companies are walking a fine line," said Glenn Cohen, faculty director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. "On the one hand, they're telling courts and regulators they're not insurance. On the other, they're telling people, 'You don't need insurance. Use us instead.' "

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.