Tag: law
Alabama's Law Protecting IVF Embryos Is Wrong -- But Consistent

Alabama's Law Protecting IVF Embryos Is Wrong -- But Consistent

I'm not here to join the mockery of Alabama for declaring that embryos are children — and, therefore, in vitro fertilization clinics must protect them forever. On the contrary, I admire its honesty. Many states have effectively banned abortions, arguing that destroying an embryo amounts to baby killing. Yet they look the other way when fertility clinics discard hundreds of thousands of unused embryos, which they routinely do.

Let's be clear. I believe in the right to an abortion within a reasonable time limit and whenever the mother's life is in danger. Mothers-to-be often refer to the cluster of cells that constitute the embryo as a "baby," which is understandable. Science does not.

Nevertheless, an Alabama court ruled that frozen embryos resulting from IVF treatments are considered children under the law. Other states have hypocritically gone halfway in that direction. Some of their fetal personhood laws let women sue for back child support since conception.

Give Alabama credit for walking the walk.

Biologically speaking, there is virtually no difference between an embryo created through IVF and one conceived naturally. And that's what the Alabama court is saying.

Fearing the political repercussions, however, Republican lawmakers in Alabama are trying to weasel out of the consequences. They are working on proposals to redefine a frozen fertilized egg as "potential life," as opposed to the fully human one inside the uterus.

Baloney. Both kinds of fertilized eggs are potential life.

Some pro-life advocates hold that while most of the embryos created in IVF clinics will never be used, the clinics enable couples to create life that wouldn't have happened without them. That's a valid argument.

But for the true opponents of abortion, that argument is one of political convenience. Former President George W. Bush made a show of pushing for adoptions of frozen embryos by women who would have them implanted. He called the embryos "snowflakes."

But fertility centers continued to discard unused embryos. Bush never threatened to close them down or force the IVF clinics — and the egg and sperm donors — to preserve them in perpetuity.

Another dodge by alleged abortion foes is the exception for rape and incest. Many politicians throw that in their abortion bans because it sounds only fair to victimized women. But if a fertilized egg represents innocent life, then the circumstances of the conception should not matter.

The pro-choice movement often aids that phony argument by condemning abortion bans with the words, "They don't even allow an exception for rape and incest." Darn right there should be no exceptions.

Democrats like Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth have foolishly helped take states that ban abortion off the hook by offering legislation that would protect IVF services nationwide. No, their politicians should live with the fallout of declaring that an embryo is a baby.

The pro-choice stance should be that a woman has a right to end an unwanted pregnancy early on and for whatever the reason: rape, an unwise night of unprotected sex, failed birth control — no questions asked. Certainly no woman should have to present police evidence that she had been brutally violated.

In the wake of the Alabama ruling, there's been an explosion of memes about listing fertilized eggs as children on tax returns and using a box of chicken eggs to get access to high-occupancy vehicle lanes. They can be pretty funny.

But those who support a constitutional right to abortion should also praise Alabama for stripping away the veils that provide phony exceptions to the protection of embryos.

Alabama has bravely followed through on its position that a fertilized egg is a child. The position may be biologically false and politically dangerous, but give the state credit for honesty.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Patients See Drug Savings From Biden Law -- As Pharma Prepares To Sue

Patients See Drug Savings From Biden Law -- As Pharma Prepares To Sue

Last year alone, David Mitchell paid $16,525 for 12 little bottles of Pomalyst, one of the pricey medications that treat his multiple myeloma, a blood cancer he was diagnosed with in 2010.

The drugs have kept his cancer at bay. But their rapidly increasing costs so infuriated Mitchell that he was inspired to create an advocacy movement.

Patients for Affordable Drugs, which he founded in 2016, was instrumental in getting drug price reforms into the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Those changes are kicking in now, and Mitchell, 73, is an early beneficiary.

In January, he plunked down $3,308 for a Pomalyst refill “and that’s it,” he said. Under the law, he has no further responsibility for his drug costs this year — a savings of more than $13,000.

The law caps out-of-pocket spending on brand-name drugs for Medicare beneficiaries at about $3,500 in 2024. The patient cap for all drugs drops to $2,000 next year.

“From a selfish perspective, I feel great about it,” he said. But the payment cap will be “truly life-changing” for hundreds of thousands of other Medicare patients, Mitchell said.

President Joe Biden’s battle against high drug prices is mostly embodied in the IRA, as the law is known — a grab bag of measures intended to give Medicare patients immediate relief and, in the long term, to impose government controls on what pharmaceutical companies charge for their products. The law represents the most significant overhaul for the U.S. drug marketplace in decades.

With Election Day on the horizon, the president is trying to make sure voters know who was responsible. This month, the White House began a campaign to get the word out to seniors.

“The days where Americans pay two to three times what they pay for prescription drugs in other countries are ending,” Biden said in a February 1 statement.

KFF polling indicates Biden has work to do. Just a quarter of adults were aware that the IRA includes provisions on drug prices in July, nearly a year after the president signed it. He isn’t helped by the name of the law, the “Inflation Reduction Act,” which says nothing about health care or drug costs.

Biden’s own estimate of drug price inflation is quite conservative: U.S. patients sometimes pay more than 10 times as much for their drugs compared with people in other countries. The popular weight loss drug Wegovy lists for $936 a month in the U.S., for example — and $83 in France.

Additional sections of the law provide free vaccines and $35-a-month insulin and federal subsidies to patients earning up to 150% of the federal poverty level, and require drugmakers to pay the government rebates for medicines whose prices rise faster than inflation. But the most controversial provision enables Medicare to negotiate prices for certain expensive drugs that have been on the market for at least nine years. It’s key to Biden’s attempt to weaken the drug industry’s grip.

Responding to Pressure

The impact of Medicare’s bargaining over drug prices for privately insured Americans remains unclear. States have taken additional steps, such as cutting copays for insulin for the privately insured.

However, insurers are increasing premiums in response to their higher costs under the IRA. Monthly premiums on traditional Medicare drug plans jumped to $48 from $40 this year, on average.

On Feb. 1, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services sent pharmaceutical makers opening bids for the first 10 expensive drugs it selected for negotiation. The companies are responding to the bids — while filing nine lawsuits that aim to kill the negotiations altogether, arguing that limiting their profits will strangle the pipeline of lifesaving drugs. A federal court in Texas dismissed one of the suits on Feb. 12, without taking up the substantive legal issue over constitutionality.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicted the IRA’s drug pricing elements would save the federal government $237 billion over 10 years while reducing the number of drugs coming to market in that period by about two.

If the government prevails in the courts, new prices for those 10 drugs will be announced by September and take effect in 2026. The government will negotiate an additional 15 drugs for 2027, another 15 for 2028, and 20 more each year thereafter. CMS has been mum about the size of its offers, but AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot on Feb. 8 called the opening bid for his company’s drug Farxiga (which earned $2.8 billion in U.S. sales in fiscal year 2023) “relatively encouraging.”

Related Biden administration efforts, as well as legislation with bipartisan support, could complement the Inflation Reduction Act’s swing at drug prices.

The House and Senate have passed bills that require greater transparency and less self-serving behavior by pharmacy benefit managers, the secretive intermediaries that decide which drugs go on patients’ formularies, the lists detailing which prescriptions are available to health plan enrollees. The Federal Trade Commission is investigating anti-competitive action by leading PBMs, as well as drug company patenting tricks that slow the entry of cheaper drugs to the market.

‘Sending a Message’

Months after drug companies began suing to stop price negotiations, the Biden administration released a framework describing when it could “march in” and essentially seize drugs created through research funded by the National Institutes of Health if they are unreasonably priced.

The timing of the march-in announcement “suggests that it’s about sending a message” to the drug industry, said Robin Feldman, who leads the Center for Innovation at the University of California Law-San Francisco. And so, in a way, does the Inflation Reduction Act itself, she said.

“I have always thought that the IRA would reverberate well beyond the unlucky 10 and others that get pulled into the net later,” Feldman said. “Companies are likely to try to moderate their behavior to stay out of negotiations. I think of all the things going on as attempts to corral the market into more reasonable pathways.”

The IRA issues did not appear to be top of mind to most executives and investors as they gathered to make deals at the annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco last month.

“I think the industry is navigating its way beyond this,” said Matthew Price, chief operating officer of Promontory Therapeutics, a cancer drug startup, in an interview there. The drugs up for negotiation “look to be assets that were already nearing the end of their patent life. So maybe the impact on revenues is less than feared. There’s alarm around this, but it was probably inevitable that a negotiation mechanism of some kind would have to come in.”

Investors generally appear sanguine about the impact of the law. A recent S&P Global report suggests “healthy revenue growth through 2027” for the pharmaceutical industry.

Back in Washington, many of the changes await action by the courts and Congress and could be shelved depending on the results of the fall election.

The restructuring of Medicare Part D, which covers most retail prescription drugs, is already lowering costs for many Medicare patients who spent more than $3,500 a year on their Part D drugs. In 2020 that was about 1.3 million patients, 200,000 of whom spent $5,000 or more out-of-pocket, according to KFF research.

“That’s real savings,” said Tricia Neuman, executive director of KFF’s Medicare policy program, “and it’s targeted to people who are really sick.”

Although the drug industry is spending millions to fight the IRA, the Part D portion of the bill could end up boosting their sales. While it forces the industry to further discount the highest-grossing drugs, the bill makes it easier for Medicare patients to pick up their medicines because they’ll be able to afford them, said Stacie Dusetzina, a Vanderbilt University School of Medicine researcher. She was the lead author of a 2022 study showing that cancer patients who didn’t get income subsidies were about half as likely to fill prescriptions.

States and foundations that help patients pay for their drugs will save money, enabling them to procure more drugs for more patients, said Gina Upchurch, the executive director of Senior PharmAssist, a Durham, North Carolina-based drug assistance program, and a member of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission. “This is good news for the drug companies,” she said.

Relief for Patients

Lynn Scarfuto, 73, a retired nurse who lives on a fixed income in upstate New York, spent $1,157 for drugs last year, while most of her share of the $205,000 annual cost for the leukemia drug Imbruvica was paid by a charity, the Patient Access Network Foundation. This year, through the IRA, she’ll pay nothing because the foundation’s first monthly Imbruvica payment covered her entire responsibility. Imbruvica, marketed jointly by AbbVie and Janssen, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, is one of the 10 drugs subject to Medicare negotiations.

“For Medicare patients, the Inflation Reduction Act is a great, wonderful thing,” Scarfuto said. “I hope the negotiation continues as they have promised, adding more drugs every year.”

Mitchell, a PR specialist who had worked with such clients as the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids and pharmaceutical giant J&J, went to an emergency room with severe back pain in November 2010 and discovered he had a cancer that had broken a vertebra and five ribs and left holes in his pelvis, skull, and forearm bones. He responded well to surgery and treatment but was shocked at the price of his drugs.

His Patients for Affordable Drugs group has become a powerful voice in Washington, engaging tens of thousands of patients, including Scarfuto, to tell their stories and lobby legislatures. The work is supported in part by millions in grants from Arnold Ventures, a philanthropy that has supported health care policies like lower drug prices, access to contraception, and solutions to the opioid epidemic.

“What got the IRA over the finish line in part was angry people who said we want something done with this,” Mitchell said. “Our patients gave voice to that.”

Arnold Ventures has provided funding for KFF Health News.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.


Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

George Santos

Judge Orders Disclosure Of Wealthy Benefactors Who Posted $500K Santos Bond

On Tuesday, Magistrate Judge Anne Y. Shields ordered the release of the identities of three people who signed on to help copiously indicted Republican Rep. George Santos post a $500,000 bond. Judge Shields gave Santos’ legal team until Friday at noon to appeal the decision.

The decision comes one day after Santos’ lawyer, Joseph Murray, said that his client would rather go to jail than release his benefactors’ identities. Murray argued that Santos was protecting these wealthy patrons’ safety, writing, “We truly fear for their health, safety and well being.”

Santos, a well-documented liar, faces 13 counts of fraud, including wire fraud, unemployment benefits fraud, money laundering, stealing public funds, and lying to Congress. There are also other outstanding investigations into Santos’ activities not covered in this specific case.

Shields’ decision is not surprising since it has been standard for the public to have access to judicial documents, including financial ones that are tied to the individual being charged. Add to this that Santos is a public official who is compelled by law to disclose his finances.

As Insider points out, in the recent high-profile case of Ghislaine Maxwell, associate of serial rapist and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, offers poured in from people to post her bond. Those identities were released, as were the identities of Sam Bankman-Fried’s bond backers in his fraud case.

As to the three still-unknown names on the George Santos bond-backing list, there has been speculation that at least one of them could be indicted alleged fraudster and exiled Chinese billionaire Ho Wan Kwok. If that name doesn’t ring a bell, maybe Guo Wengui or one of his four other aliases does? Wengui is the name connected to Steve Bannon and that knucklehead’s own indictment.

Whether or not he is connected to Santos’ case remains to be seen. But considering how untoward Santos, Bannon, Guo, Trump, and the entire Republican establishment are at this point, it wouldn’t be surprising in the least.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Major Law Firms Won't 'Go Anywhere Near Trump'

Dershowitz: Major Law Firms Won't 'Go Anywhere Near Trump'

Alan Dershowitz has revealed that many of the United States' most reputable law firms are refusing to allow their attorneys to "go anywhere near" former President Donald Trump amid his legal woes and ongoing search for legal representation, Business Insider reports.

Speaking to the news outlet, Dershowitz —who represented the former president during his second impeachment trial— weighed in on the challenges Trump is facing as he appears to have been blackballed as his legal issues have progressed over the last couple of weeks.

"All big-firm lawyers have told me that their firms won't let them do it," Dershowitz said in an interview. "The firms won't let them go near any case involving Trump. These are firms that want to continue to have clients, and they know that if they represent Donald Trump, they'll lose a lot of clients."


The news outlet noted that Dershowitz was speaking from experience. The veteran lawyer noted the aftermath he faced after representing Trump during his second impeachment trial.

He admitted that he lost a number of job opportunities and speaking engagements.

"Everybody who has called me has shown reluctance to do it," he said. "They say their law firms won't let them do it. Their husbands or wives won't let them do it. Their children won't let them do it. Their friends won't let them do it, even though they want to do it."

Dershowitz, according to Insider, also said "that since he represented Trump, at least six lawyers had asked him about what it was like working for the former president and whether it affected his career."

He also recalled a past conversation with another attorney where he shared his personal experience of being blackballed after working for Trump and that attorney reportedly said, he said the person responded, "I'm not going near this with a 10-foot pole."

However, Trump's legal woes are reportedly not the only reason why attorneys are apprehensive about representing him. One lawyer with knowledge of how Trump's team operates also weighed in with attorneys' concerns.

"He likes to run the show, and as the old saying goes, if you represent yourself, you've got a fool for a client," one lawyer said. "He's a big believer in the public-relations assault, which I've never seen work. I don't see anybody with any experience it takes to represent a former president in a case like this. There's a lot at stake here."

The lawyer also offered a brief assessment of the Federal Bureau of Investigations' (FBI) case Trump is currently facing. "The classified-documents case is an easy one," the lawyer also said. "It's open and shut. He took an administrative issue and turned it into a full-blown criminal case.

"He should be worried about all these investigations. I think he's a target of all of them, and I think he'll get indicted."

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.