IGNORANCE IS NOT BLISS: THE CONSEQUENCES OF HOW LITTLE WE KNOW ABOUT COVID-19

This article, Ignorance is not bliss: The consequences of how little we know about COVID-19, first appeared in the California Lawyers Association’s California Law News, 2020, Issue Three on October 25, 2020.

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” – François-Marie Arouet (Voltaire)

LESSONS FROM THE PAST (X37.41XA)1

Following the 1994 Northridge earthquake, California passed legislation requiring hospitals to upgrade their physical infrastructure to survive future seismic events. Twenty-six years and multiple extensions later, California hospitals face a 2030 deadline with an eleven-figure price tag.2 Spending money on what may occur is not uncommon in health care. A 2017 study commissioned by the American Hospital Association estimated that hospitals and health systems spent as much as $2.7 billion the year before to prepare for, and respond to, the threat of violence at work.3 California law requires hospitals to rehearse disaster plans at least twice each year.4

A NOVEL THREAT (A98.4)5

An expensive endeavor, hospital disaster preparedness focuses on a rapid response to an unexpected event, designed to protect, stabilize, and bring calm to shaken communities following a disaster’s aftermath. The 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has presented a different type of disaster, necessitating just as novel a response. In the pandemic’s early days, it moved in slow-motion as the health care community initiated disaster protocol over a period of weeks, not hours. While mobilizing any hospital to battle a pandemic is not easy, legally at least, hospitals benefitted from unprecedented support by practically every federal and state agency. The assistance from these dual agencies eliminated most barriers overnight so hospitals could establish and maintain momentum in the face of an epic disaster that, over several months, has moved forward, backward, and forward again.6 … Read more →

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Much Ado About Covid

Healthcare News first published this article, “Much Ado About Covid,” on August 4, 2020.

“I fear those big words which make us so unhappy.”  — James Augustine Aloysius Joyce

The Age Of The Pandemic

Once upon a time severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) caused the 2019 novel coronavirus, a pandemic commonly known as COVID-19 or simply COVID.  Considered to be of zoonotic origin, COVID is closely related to bat coronaviruses, pangolin coronaviruses and SARS-CoV, although the full extent of the pandemic’s epidemiology may take years to unfold.  Nearing the fifth-month since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, the medical community, the media and the masses continue to debate the efficacy of social distancing, masks and the mortality rate while the general structure of modern civilization as it existed in late February 2020 continues to crumble. … Read more →

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ON THE ORIGIN OF PANDEMIC

“Earth laughs in flowers.”  – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Healthcare News first published this article, “On the Origin of Pandemic” on May 5, 2020.

The Battle for Planet Earth

Civilization remains under heavy attack, and for the first time in modern history almost all nations around the globe unify in battle.  The common enemy, Planet Earth, has waged war against homo sapiens since the species first ventured away from Africa to populate the rest of Earth. The planet remains undefeated in conflict and well rested since it ended all but the birds during its last global extinction campaign some 66 million years earlier.

Science speculates that Planet Earth defeated its last enemy with the help of an extra-terrestrial ally (an asteroid/meteor).  To date the planet has proven a formidable opponent, relying upon its own, antiquated but effective arsenal, employing documented textbook military strategies for over 5,000 years, including a prehistoric village in China to Athens in antiquity to Eurasia in the fourteenth century to Mexico and Central America in the sixteenth century.  Recently, Planet Earth upped its game by striking the global population in the 1918 Spanish Flu, HIV/AIDS (while still a pandemic, the virus peaked between 2005 and 2012), and most recently the 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19). … Read more →

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Do We Really Need Health Care, After All?

Healthcare News first published this article, Do We Really Need Health Care, After All?, on January 14, 2020.

“There are no facts, only interpretations.” – Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

A Decade of Reform

More than seven years ago, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts saved the Affordable Care Act (the “ACA”) by upholding the constitutionality of the individual mandate through Congress’s authority to “lay and collect Taxes.”  Rejecting the Commerce Clause and the Necessary and Proper Clause as a means to sustain the individual mandate, the Court acknowledged that Congress’s taxing authority can exceed its power to regulate commerce, but the power to tax affords Congress less control over individual behavior than its power to regulate commerce.  At the time Chief Justice Roberts concluded Congress can only require “an individual to pay money into the Federal Treasury, no more.”  As it turns out, Congress was unable to require an individual to pay the cost of the individual mandate, leaving the Internal Revenue Service to focus its collection efforts on the interception of refunds.

In December 2017, Congress passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, setting the “shared responsibility payment” amount to the lesser of zero percent of an individual’s household income or $0.00, effective January 2019.  Following Congress’s slight modification of the ACA, a U.S. District Court in Texas held that the individual mandate was unconstitutional because it no longer was a tax, and according to Chief Justice Roberts in 2012, no other constitutional provision justified such an exercise of congressional power.  That same District Court concluded that without the individual mandate, the entirety of the ACA failed.

Last month the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit agreed that the individual mandate was unconstitutional, but returned the case back to the District Court to revisit whether the ACA can stand on its own without the individual mandate.  … Read more →

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