SCHOLARSHIP
SIU/SIH Health Policy Institute “The Health Care Quality Improvement Act of 1986 Meets the Era of Health Care Reform: Continuing Themes and Common Threads”
Panelists at the 14th annual SIU/SIH Health Policy Institute examined how themes central to federal laws put in place in 2010 will impact or improve upon federal health policy laws enacted 25 years ago. The 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act continues many similar themes of the government’s role in health care that came with the 1986 Health Care Quality Improvement Act (HCQIA), said Assistant Professor Michele Mekel. Other themes involve the relationships between health care providers and health care payers -- the government and insurance companies, and
From left: Moderator Michele Mekel, Assistant Professor of Law, SIU School of Law; William Robinson, Public Health Consultant; David C. Pate, President and CEO for St. Luke’s Health System in Boise, ID; Kristin Madison, Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School; Mark Rust, Barnes & Thornburg, LLP, Chair of the firm’s national Healthcare Department; James N. Thompson, Senior Consultant, The Hayes Group International; Moderator Ross Silverman, Associate Professor of Medical Humanities and Medical Jurisprudence, SIU School of Medicine
hospitals and physicians, she said. The focus for those attending was to see how the two laws build upon each other, Mekel said. The conference helped give health care providers, policymakers, physicians, attorneys, and others who are interested in the medical and legal issues that involve health care reform some perspective on “where we’ve come from,” she said. “Far too often we look at new legislation or a new trend from within a vacuum,” she said.
Mekel hopes participants gained perspective on the history of the government’s involvement with health care quality, data monitoring and provider relationships, and then use that in determining “where we are going as we unfold health care reform.” Southern Illinois Healthcare, the SIU School of Medicine, the law school’s Center for Health Law and Policy, the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute, and St. Louis-based Sandberg, Phoenix & von Gontard law firm were program sponsors.
Ryan Bioethicistin-Residence
“Blood Libel and Generational Curses: The Legacy of American Eugenics” A social theory that once reached the United States Supreme Court, was practiced in Nazi Germany, and remains in state statutes today was the focus of the lecture presented by the 2011 John & Marsha Ryan Bioethicist-in-Residence Paul A. Lombardo. Lombardo, a professor at Georgia State University College of Law in Atlanta, discussed the eugenics movement in America. Eugenics involves either attempting to improve
From left: Dean Cynthia Fountaine, Professor Paul Lombardo, Dr. Marsha Ryan ’87, & John Ryan ’76
a society by breeding positive heredity qualities, or at the other end of the spectrum, trying to erase purported genetic defects by discouraging or eliminating reproductive possibilities.
Supreme Court decision in “Buck v. Bell” which endorsed eugenical sterilization laws in aVirginia case. Lombardo has written about Buck’s case for more than 20 years.
A senior adviser toThe Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, Lombardo is a national expert on eugenics. His advocacy for state governmental repudiation of eugenics has been successful in seven states, and he sponsored a historical marker memorializing the 1927 U.S.
Lombardo also met with law students and with the combined ethics committees of Southern Illinois Healthcare before traveling to Springfield, to meet with faculty and students at the SIU School of Medicine.
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