Problems in the field of health law often force tradeoffs between uniformity and particularity in health care decision-making. Patients are highly diverse in terms of their basic health status, willingness to accept risk or uncertainty in new treatments, and ability to pay for care. And health care experts - doctors, research scientists, insurance company reviewers, and health economists - are similarly diverse in their perception of the best treatment and payment structure choices. In a world with such persistent heterogeneity of (...) opinions and preferences, a society's choice between centralized rules for treatment and payment and a more diffuse decisional regime is both crucial and controversial. Opt for a uniform national rule - say, a federal statute governing treatment standards, drug approval, or health finance - and many beneficial autonomous transactions between doctors and patients are squelched, with possible detrimental effects on population health and medical innovation. (shrink)

Problems in the field of health law often force tradeoffs between uniformity and particularity in health care decision-making. Patients are highly diverse in terms of their basic health status, willingness to accept risk or uncertainty in new treatments, and ability to pay for care. And health care experts - doctors, research scientists, insurance company reviewers, and health economists - are similarly diverse in their perception of the best treatment and payment structure choices. In a world with such persistent heterogeneity of (...) opinions and preferences, a society's choice between centralized rules for treatment and payment and a more diffuse decisional regime is both crucial and controversial. Opt for a uniform national rule - say, a federal statute governing treatment standards, drug approval, or health finance - and many beneficial autonomous transactions between doctors and patients are squelched, with possible detrimental effects on population health and medical innovation. (shrink)

Almost everyone involved in the legal profession today is aware of the wide, and perhaps insurmountable, chasm between the scholarly research that takes place in elite law schools and the actual work of practicing lawyers and judges. To a greater extent than other academic professions like medicine and public health, law professors too often have little to say to working lawyers and judges, even those judges on the U.S. Supreme Court. Perhaps this has been the case from the beginning, but (...) the gap appears more dramatic in recent decades, as legal scholarship has departed from traditional doctrinal analysis and moved in more interdisciplinary and abstract theoretical directions. (shrink)