Glenn Cohen

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 The lifetime ban for blood donation by men who have sex with men (MSM) “may be perpetuating outdated homophobic perceptions,” wrote Dr.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…

An op-ed by I. Glenn Cohen, Holly Fernandez Lynch, and Gregory D. Curfman. At the tail end of this year's Supreme Court term, religious freedom came into sharp conflict with the government's interest in providing affordable access to health care. In a consolidated opinion in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores and Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp. v. Burwell (collectively known as Hobby Lobby) delivered on June 30, the Court sided with religious freedom, highlighting the limitations of our employment-based health insurance system.

I. Glenn Cohen, Harvard Law School professor specializing in medical ethics, talks with Rachel Maddow about the objections of medical professionals to doctors lending their expertise to assisting states in killing prisoners.

…Nearly a decade later, the Nashville teen and her egg donor came together in a way as modern as her birth, after a search on an Internet database, a timid message on Facebook and, finally, a tearful introduction on Katie Couric's daytime TV talk show. The show will air June 12…The identity of U.S. sperm and egg donors is protected by default. In the United Kingdom, Australia and other countries, sperm and egg donors must be willing to be contacted when their offspring turns 18, said I. Glenn Cohen, a Harvard University law professor who specializes in bioethics. But some birth parents still never tell because they don't want to be undermined by a second relationship, Cohen said, and it can be tough for a child to be rejected by the donor. If the United States were to mandate more openness, Cohen said, he'd also like laws that determine how much responsibility the donor must take on.

An op-ed by Robert D. Truog, I. Glenn Cohen, and Mark A. Rockoff. In an opinion dissenting from a Supreme Court decision to deny review in a death penalty case, Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun famously wrote, “From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death.” In the wake of the recent botched execution by lethal injection in Oklahoma, however, a group of eminent legal professionals known as the Death Penalty Committee of The Constitution Project has published a sweeping set of 39 recommendations that not only tinker with, but hope to fix, the multitude of problems that affect this method of capital punishment.

“Designing Systems and Processes for Managing Disputes” (Wolters Kluwer, 2013), co-written by Clinical Professor Robert C. Bordone ’97, Professor Emeritus Frank E.A. Sander ’52, Nancy H. Rogers, and Craig A. McEwen, is the first course book of its kind offering a multidisciplinary and skill-based guide to designing and implementing alternative dispute resolution systems.