American Journal of Law & Medicine最新文献

Purpose: Dietary supplements sold for weight loss pose a risk to public health due to deceptive claims and unscrupulous manufacturing practices in the context of weak federal regulation. Efforts to strengthen U.S. federal oversight have not been successful, thus action at the state and local levels should be explored. This study investigates proposed action to impose excise taxes on weight-loss supplements.

Methods: We reviewed U.S. federal law on taxation at federal, state, and local levels and precedent for taxation of harmful consumer products to promote public health. We assessed the rationale, legal viability, and potential effectiveness of proposed excise taxes on weight loss supplements.

Results: Taxation of tobacco and sweetened beverages is effective in reducing consumer use. Imposition of excise taxes on weight-loss supplements is within the authority of federal, state, and local governments, though is least politically feasible at the federal level. State or local taxation of these products has clear rationale, legal viability, and likelihood of effectiveness in reducing the public health burden posed by these products.

Conclusions: Excise taxation is an effective policy intervention to reduce consumer use, particularly among youth, and is a promising public health strategy to decrease consumer exposure to noxious weight-loss supplements.

This Article tackles the critical problem of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and provides a normative framework for legal policies to address such hesitancy in the ongoing pandemic. The foundation of this Article rests in decision-making theories that allow policymakers to understand individual misperception of risk as compared to evidence-based assessment of risk. Vaccine-hesitant individuals assign a high risk to the COVID-19 vaccine and a low risk to the disease-a perception that is disconnected from the science. The backbone of this Article is the timeline of the COVID-19 pandemic and the underlying science of the disease and vaccines. The timeline provides a factual background to demonstrate how vaccine hesitancy to the COVID-19 vaccine emerged. The instant pandemic also demonstrates changes in how individuals see themselves in society, receive information, and are persuaded by economic forces. This Article combines the individual's decision-making process with modern day variables to suggest interventions that can undo anti-vaccine damage. While the novelty of the normative framework provided herein is instructive for current COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy issues, this framework can be applied to other areas in which individual's perceptions of risk are disconnected from evidence-based assessment of risk.

For years, the federal government has failed to uphold its promises to provide health care to Native Americans. These promises are echoed in treaties, the Constitution, and judicially-created law. As a result of this breach of promise and chronically underfunding, there are significant health disparities between indigenous populations and other Americans. In a recent 2020 case, McGirt v. Oklahoma, the U.S. Supreme Court held that both the federal government and individual states must follow the terms of a treaty made with a tribe, encouraging the possibility of direct health care funding. This reform, however, means little without tribal sovereignty and self-determination, which give dignity and decisionmaking capabilities back to a group that has long been without them. This Note explores two examples of self-determination in Native American health care, the Alaskan Native health care system and the recent vaccine rollout, proposing a framework for increasing self-determination in health care to provide support for funding reform, which becomes increasingly necessary as Native Americans continue to struggle to access health care.

This Note details and proposes a solution to the deficit in access to justice and to care faced by the LGBTQ+ community due to historical and ongoing homophobia and transphobia in both the legal and medical fields. The proposed solution is the integration of medical-legal partnerships ("MLPs") into LGBTQ+ resource organizations. These organizations already serve and have the trust of the queer community, which lowers one barrier to access medical and legal services for the LGBTQ+ community: mistrust and negative past experiences. MLPs are the ideal solution to this problem because they would not only allow LGBTQ+ individuals to access medical and legal services, but to receive holistic services that account for their personal circumstances as well as their physical health. Underlying this premise is the concept of social determinants of health, which are environmental and social factors that create systemic roadblocks to wellness. By creating an integrated MLP, professionals can address these social determinants head on and remedy the underlying causes of poor health. This is especially important for LGBTQ+ people whose minoritized identities often lead them to have multiple negative social determinants of health. The integration of MLPs into LGBTQ+ resource organizations would allow queer individuals to get the care they need-not just physically, but socially and environmentally.