Maryland Introduces Health Care Reform Legislation

According to the Washington Post, public health advocates in Maryland unveiled a $15.5 billion plan for universal health care.  The plan would subsidize insurance coverage for low-income residents with a payroll tax and increases to cigarette and alcohol taxes.

The plan would also allow small businesses and individuals to join an insurance pool, giving them leverage to negotiate lower rates for policies than on their own.  The state of Maryland itself would cover the costs of catastrophic care and patients would face higher co-payments for less effective and more expensive procedures.

Lawmakers and advocates both acknowledge that the plan has no chance for passage soon, but hope that this is a step towards future health care reform.

Senator Baucus to Take the Lead on Health Care Reform

Senator Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, has unveiled his plan to guarantee health insurance for all Americans.  In contrast to the plan put forward by Senator John McCain during his presidential bid, which favored individual purchases of health care in the market rather than through an employer, Senator Baucus aims to encourage insurance through employment.  Senator Baucus also proposes to expand Medicaid and Medicare.  Senator Baucus’s plan would eventually require everyone to have health insurance coverage, with federal subsidies for those who could not otherwise afford it.

“Every American has a right to affordable, high-quality health care,” Mr. Baucus said. “Americans cannot wait any longer.”

Other Democrats, such as Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Representatives John D. Dingell of Michigan and Pete Stark of California, are also drafting plans to expand insurance coverage and contain health care costs.

Read more about Senator Baucus’s plan, after the jump.

Scholar’s Corner: Recent Scholarly Works in Global Health Law

Germs on a Plane!: Legal Protections Afforded to International Air Travelers and Governments in the Event of a Suspected or Actual Contagious Passenger and Proposals to Strengthen Them

Alexandra R. Harrington
McGill University – Faculty of Law
Journal of Law and Health, 2007

 

Abstract:     
In August, 2006, American moviegoers watched as passengers on an airplane were terrified by poisonous snakes in the movie “Snakes on a Plane.” In May, 2007, news watchers across the globe were riveted by the true story of an Atlanta lawyer who flew from the United States to several destinations in Europe for his wedding and honeymoon although he was carrying a drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis. The latter event was met with public outcry; the former was a box office hit which played on the fears of viewers. However, the implications of the tuberculosis incident have reverberated throughout the aviation, legal, and medical communities in a way in which fictional killer snakes cannot. The tuberculosis traveler incident illustrated that there are several areas in which travelers are protected by neither law nor medicine. This article will examine two issues which were highlighted by the tuberculosis traveler incident and its aftermath: 1) the effectiveness of the current legal regimes in international law in stopping the health threat posed by individual carriers of communicable diseases who attempt to travel on an aircraft and 2) the legal standards – or lack thereof – applicable to international travelers when their course of travel is interrupted because they are deemed to constitute a threat to public health by the nation to which they are traveling or at an intermediate point during their travels. Part II of this article describes the various applicable international law regimes and provisions which govern air travel and infectious disease as well as several forms of infectious diseases which pose a threat during air travel. Part III discusses the issue of protecting travelers from infectious disease based threats posed by individual travelers. In this Part, the author advocates the creation of a public health-based do-not-fly list akin to the terror based do-not-fly list currently used by the American government to ensure that travelers who pose a threat to public health do not board aircraft or engage in air travel until their health status can be confirmed or they are deemed to be no longer contagious to the general public. Part IV of this article discusses the issue of travelers who have left their home country en route to another country and are denied entry or detained by the destination country – or a third party country through which the traveler is to connect – on the ground of suspicion of illness. Initially, there seems not to be an issue under the terms of the IHR which allow a state to deny entry to any traveler or to hold them for observation, testing, or quarantine on suspicion of illness. However, those are the only rules set forth by the IHR and issues such as how to transport a traveler denied entry on the grounds of illness safely home are not addressed. In this Part, the author argues that simple amendments to the IHR regime and the Vienna Conventions on Diplomatic Relations of 1961 and on Consular Relations of 1963 would clarify these issues and spare future air travelers from uncertainty or unnecessary exposure to infectious disease. The article concludes that addressing the issues raised is an immediate necessity because of the frequency of international air travel, the devastation which both global pandemics and regional outbreaks of infectious disease have, can, and will cause at a variety of levels.

Google Tracks and Predicts the Flu

In addition to predicting outbreaks of malaria and meningitis through Google.org, it turns out the google search engine itself is quite the predictor of flu outbreaks.  According to the New York Times, people type phrases such as “flu symptoms” into a search engine long before visiting a doctor, enabling google to identify flu outbreaks before cases are even reported even to the CDC. 

For example, Google’s search data showed a spike in queries about flu symptoms two weeks before the CDC reported that flu cases had spiked in mid-Atlantic states in early February.  Unlike google, the CDC relies on data collected and compiled from health care providers, labs and other sources.

Public health experts hope that Google’s accelerated recognition of an outbreak can help accelerate the response of doctors and other health care providers, reducing the spread of the disease and, hopefully, saving lives.

The service covers only the United States, but Google is hoping to eventually use the same technique to help track influenza and other diseases worldwide.

Check out google’s new flu tracking service here.