Health Care – Page 20 – Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog

What Are The Core Constitutional Values Behind The Tea Party Movement?

Post author:Edward A. Fallone
Post published:April 3, 2010
Post category:Constitutional Interpretation Federalism Health Care Legal Scholarship Political Processes & Rhetoric

I recently posted an article on SSRN entitled “Charters, Compacts and Tea Parties: The Decline and Resurrection of a Delegation View of the Constitution.” You can download the article here.

The emergence of the Tea Party Movement as a political phenomenon has generated a great deal of media attention and punditry over the last year. Most observers have concluded that those who self-identify as “tea partiers” comprise a loose amalgamation of libertarians, states’ rights advocates and opponents of government intervention in the free markets. While most activists have a Republican voting record, the Movement appears to have arisen independent of the Republican Party. Critics of the Bush Administration’s domestic spying activities stand shoulder to shoulder with skeptics of the Obama Administration’s health care reform efforts. To the extent that Tea Party activists share one common political philosophy, that philosophy might best be described as “rage against the federal government.”

Liberals seem inclined to deny the existence of any intellectual content behind the Tea Party Movement, preferring to focus on the undeniable presence of some racists, militia members, and conspiracy theorists among the activists. While it is safe to assume that, for some, anger at the federal government seems inextricably connected to the fact that an African-American is President, Juan Williams is correct when he identifies the core concerns of the Movement as non-racial. Similarly, the “birthers” and other fringe elements in the Movement are merely piggy backing on a generalized anger against the federal government that does not derive from their parochial concerns. Our nation’s public discourse would benefit greatly if conservative intellectuals did more to repudiate these fringe elements, much the way that William F. Buckley famously repudiated the John Birch Society in 1965, but the “anger industry” that profits off of cable television, books and political fundraising appeals is apparently loathe to alienate any of its prime consumers.

Is Prevention in Health Care Misguided?

Post author:Alison Barnes
Post published:March 10, 2010
Post category:Health Care

Please, don’t throw tomatoes yet! Everybody knows that prevention in the twentieth century, particularly due to use of infectious disease vaccines and more recently some innovative invasive procedures, has changed the demographic face of our population and the world’s.

Of course, while what “everybody” knows is never the whole of the matter, the inspiring story of diagnosis, followed by treatment, followed by survival is a wonderful sequence of events.

An upcoming symposium is about the flip-side of that coin (although it has been very hard to get people to talk about it). About eighteen months ago, we chose to bring together scholars who don’t necessarily presume that the mainstream health care perspective of diagnosis and follow-up treatment is more than a single widely endorsed perspective. The upcoming symposium, part of the annual series on health/disability/elder law held by Marquette’s Elder’s Advisor law review, proposes that prevention is often enough overrated that close examination is warranted. The symposium is titled “The Institutionalization of Prevention: We Win, We Lose.”

Cancer diagnosis and treatment is particularly, but hardly exclusively, illustrative.

Milwaukee Sick Leave Ordinance May Be Headed to State Supreme Court

Post author:Paul M. Secunda
Post published:February 24, 2010
Post category:Health Care Labor & Employment Law Milwaukee

Hat tip to CCH Technical Answer group for an update on the status of the Milwaukee Sick Pay Ordinance that was passed by referendum in November 2008, only to be invalidated by a state trial court judge. According to the posting, the Milwaukee paid sick leave case has now been referred to the state supreme court:

On February 18, 2010, the Wisconsin Court of Appeals asked the Wisconsin Supreme Court to take up the constitutionality of Milwaukee’s paid sick leave mandate.

In June 2009, Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Thomas Cooper ruled that the city’s paid sick leave ordinance, which provided up to nine paid sick days per year based on the number of hours worked and the size of the business, was “invalidly enacted and unconstitutional.” (Metropolitan Milwaukee Assoc. of Comm. v. City of Milwaukee, Milwaukee County Circuit Court, No. 08cv018220, June 12, 2009). 9to5, the National Association of Working Women, appealed Cooper’s ruling. The supreme court has been asked to decide whether the ballot question put before the voters of the City of Milwaukee complied with the statutory requirement that it contain “a concise statement of [the ordinance’s] nature” — whether voters were informed of the contents of the ordinance . . . .

Nearly 70 percent of . . . voters approved the referendum for paid sick leave in the November 2008 election.

Marcia McCormick (St. Louis) has written before on the ordinance. I personally think the law was properly enacted and constitutional. It will be interesting to see whether the Wisconsin Supreme Court takes the case.