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The Public Health Aspects of Environmental Enforcement
Get PDFBeyond being an environmental concern, pollution is a public health problem. As a result, enforcement of anti-pollution statutes, such as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, not only protects the environment, but also furthers fundamental public health goals. Moreover, public health benefits provide politically salient arguments for continuing and even strengthening environmental protection that can counteract any political opposition that can arise as a result of the costs of environmental regulation and compliance to regulated entities and the taxpayers.Thus, it is worth examining the extent to which the Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) considers the public health in its environmental enforcement priorities and decisions. Focusing on the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, this Article undertakes such an examination by: (1) outlining the statutory connections between public health considerations and environmental regulation; (2) examining the EPA’s enforcement priorities and guidance; and (3) criticizing the EPA’s presentation of its own enforcement effectiveness over the last decade.This Article concludes that public health considerations do play a significant role in environmental enforcement policies and decisionmaking. However, the EPA’s commitment to presenting the public health benefits of its enforcement actions has varied considerably over the last decade. With the release of its FY2009 enforcement assessment, however, the EPA has both expanded its analysis of the connection between environmental pollution enforcement and public health benefits and created new tools to enhance the transparency of these benefits to the affected public
Sound Body, Sound Mind—The Impact of the Mental Health Parity Act of 2008
Get PDFOn October 3, 2008, in response to bank and lending house failures and the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, President Bush signed into law the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, more commonly known as the “bailout bill.” As funds 1 from the financial relief program created by the bailout bill, the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), are spent to slowly reverse the economic recession, another positive effect of the bailout bill has already taken hold in an area having nothing to do with financial markets—health insurance coverage for Americans suffering from mental illness. This is because, buried within the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, is the Paul Wellstone and Pete Domenici Mental Health Parity and Addiction Act of 2008 (the “2008 Act”)—legislation that requires parity in insurance coverage for physical and mental illness
Focusing on Demand Side Management in the Future of the Electric Grid
Get PDFThe widespread blackout that occurred on August 14, 2003 (“the blackout”) exposed the weaknesses of the current electric transmission grid structure, and underscored the need for improvements to the transmission grid in the United States. The outage knocked out power to approximately fifty million people in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey and the Canadian province of Ontario. 1 The total cost in the United States was estimated to be between 10 billion
Waiving Environmental Concerns Along the Border: Fence Construction and the Waiver Authority of the Real ID Act
Get PDFIn 1994, the former Immigration and Naturalization Service (“INS”) instituted a border enforcement policy aimed at deterring illegal immigration along strategic points of the United States’ southern border by increasing the presence of border patrol agents and constructing physical barriers. 3 The INS anticipated that securing conventional routes of entry would force illegal immigrants to more remote and rugged sections of the border that would be more difficult to traverse.4 The ultimate success of the policy has been debated, but it did result in a substantial decrease of illegal entries in places like San Diego, California and El Paso, Texas.5 As anticipated, the number of attempted illegal entries also increased along more remote sections of the border, although it is unclear that the inhospitable terrain has deterred significant numbers of illegal immigrants from crossing the border
Crisis in the Making: What is Wrong with Pennsylvania Public Health Law
Get PDFThere are few areas of government enterprise where the need to “get it right” is so critical as formulating and executing laws affecting the public health. When the government sets out to exercise its police power 1 to control the spread of disease, its goal is to accomplish an immensely important practical task; and its success is to a great degree objectively determinable—the spread of disease is either curtailed or not. However, the manner in which the government’s goal is reached reflects not only its pragmatic concerns but also a society’s political, social, and legal values
Introduction
Get PDFAs recently as the mid- to late-nineteenth century, it could honestly be said that there was no medical profession in the United States. Yes, there were doctors. And of course there were patients with illness and injuries. But if it is contentious today as to how best to treat various conditions, a century and a half ago it was nothing short of a circus. Although the American Medical Association had been founded in 1847, allopathic medicine could hardly be said to be the dominant school of thought. Others abounded, some of which still exist today, but none of them were capable of doing very much in the way of treating illness
Intersection of Tax-Exemption and Fraud and Abuse Issues
Get PDFMr. Boyle: Thank you, Alan. First, I want to thank Jan Wenzel from our firm who is a 1999 Health Law Certificate graduate for pulling together some research material.With regard to Tom Hyatt’s comments, let me raise a couple of questions or comments to respond to those comments before I move into some of the other areas. First off, when you look at the test that was designed by the IRS in 1969 we really did not have many hospitals in large parts of the country that were participating in Medicare and Medicaid. In other words, you had a lot of hospitals that were not Medicare/Medicaid providers. You also at that time did not have a very high population that was covered by Medicare and Medicaid. UPMC today, my guess is, 50 to 60 percent of their revenue or patient flow is from Medicare or Medicaid. So of course you have today very few hospitals that do not participate in Medicare or Medicaid because the percentage of the population that has gone into those programs has grown far beyond what was projected in the mid-60s and certainly by 1969.
Non-Profit Hospitals, Tax Exemption and Access for the Uninsured
Get PDFI want to approach the topic of tax exemption for non-profit hospitals from the perspective of the 46 plus million Americans who have no health insurance and the significant additionalnumber whom we might characterize as underinsured. In essence, persons who are underinsured have some form of health coverage but they remain at serious risk for significant out-of-pocket expenditures when they become sick. From this perspective, the key question is what role, if any, do the non-profit health care sector and, more particularly, non-profit hospitals have to play in addressing the vexing problems posed by the large number of uninsured and underinsured. We tend to think of these problems primarily, although not exclusively, as problems of access
Worker “Right to Know” in 30-year Retrospect: Did We Get it Right, with What We Know Today?
Get PDFThree decades later, did we negotiators get it right? When in 2007 we passed the 30th anniversary of the first “right to know” workplace disclosure rules, 1 should we who negotiated the rule reflect favorably on what was produced? And which of the competing sides, once labeled Doomsayers or Pollyannas, has been proven correct by the miraculous clarity of hindsight? We who were “present at the creation” of the Occupational Safety & Health Administration (“OSHA”) Hazard Communication Standard2 find the saga a mixture of success, frustration and unmet expectations. This essay offers one player’s historical and policy retrospective, and I draw an ambiguous conclusion about an unsettled controversy
Remarks on Tax Issues
Get PDFI kept praying that by the time the program got to me, there would be something left to say. My experience is purely as a tax advisor and not as an advisor to a hospital health care provider. Therefore, I do not have quite the overlap that the other speakers have had. But I can tell you how the IRS operates in this area and I can give you perhaps some predictions and some things to look for. Now, these thoughts are entirely mine. I did call my former colleagues at the IRS to find out if they would tell me anything, and they are not about to let somebody like me give information of that nature to an audience like you. Any such breaking information will definitely come directly from members of the IRS and Treasury