Tuesday, July 8, 2025
ISSN 2765-8767
  • Survey
  • Podcast
  • Write for Us
  • My Account
  • Log In
Daily Remedy
  • Home
  • Articles
  • Podcasts
    Your Body, Your Health Care: A Conversation with Dr. Jeffrey Singer

    Your Body, Your Health Care: A Conversation with Dr. Jeffrey Singer

    July 1, 2025
    Unlocking the Secrets of GLP-1 Medications

    The cost structure of hospitals nearly doubles

    July 1, 2025
    Navigating the Medical Licensing Maze

    The Fight Against Healthcare Fraud: Dr. Rafai’s Story

    April 8, 2025
    Navigating the Medical Licensing Maze

    Navigating the Medical Licensing Maze

    April 4, 2025
    The Alarming Truth About Health Insurance Denials

    The Alarming Truth About Health Insurance Denials

    February 3, 2025
    Telehealth in Turmoil

    The Importance of NIH Grants

    January 31, 2025
  • Surveys

    Surveys

    What concerns you most about your healthcare?

    What concerns you most about your healthcare?

    July 1, 2025
    Perception vs. Comprehension: Public Understanding of the 2025 MAHA Report

    Perception vs. Comprehension: Public Understanding of the 2025 MAHA Report

    June 4, 2025

    Survey Results

    Do you believe national polls on health issues are accurate

    National health polls: trust in healthcare system accuracy?

    May 8, 2024
    Which health policy issues matter the most to Republican voters in the primaries?

    Which health policy issues matter the most to Republican voters in the primaries?

    May 14, 2024
    How strongly do you believe that you can tell when your provider does not trust you?

    How strongly do you believe that you can tell when your provider does not trust you?

    May 7, 2024
  • Courses
  • About Us
  • Contact us
  • Support Us
  • Official Learner
No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Articles
  • Podcasts
    Your Body, Your Health Care: A Conversation with Dr. Jeffrey Singer

    Your Body, Your Health Care: A Conversation with Dr. Jeffrey Singer

    July 1, 2025
    Unlocking the Secrets of GLP-1 Medications

    The cost structure of hospitals nearly doubles

    July 1, 2025
    Navigating the Medical Licensing Maze

    The Fight Against Healthcare Fraud: Dr. Rafai’s Story

    April 8, 2025
    Navigating the Medical Licensing Maze

    Navigating the Medical Licensing Maze

    April 4, 2025
    The Alarming Truth About Health Insurance Denials

    The Alarming Truth About Health Insurance Denials

    February 3, 2025
    Telehealth in Turmoil

    The Importance of NIH Grants

    January 31, 2025
  • Surveys

    Surveys

    What concerns you most about your healthcare?

    What concerns you most about your healthcare?

    July 1, 2025
    Perception vs. Comprehension: Public Understanding of the 2025 MAHA Report

    Perception vs. Comprehension: Public Understanding of the 2025 MAHA Report

    June 4, 2025

    Survey Results

    Do you believe national polls on health issues are accurate

    National health polls: trust in healthcare system accuracy?

    May 8, 2024
    Which health policy issues matter the most to Republican voters in the primaries?

    Which health policy issues matter the most to Republican voters in the primaries?

    May 14, 2024
    How strongly do you believe that you can tell when your provider does not trust you?

    How strongly do you believe that you can tell when your provider does not trust you?

    May 7, 2024
  • Courses
  • About Us
  • Contact us
  • Support Us
  • Official Learner
No Result
View All Result
Daily Remedy
No Result
View All Result
Home Politics & Law

Legal Fluency v. Patient Rights

Daily Remedy by Daily Remedy
August 8, 2021
in Politics & Law
0

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” A well recited quotation from Leo Tolstoy’s novel, Anna Karenina implying most families that see themselves as happy share certain characteristics. And those that are not, are uniquely different. But while we attempt to emulate the perceived similarities, we inevitably find more to learn from the differences.

Within the differences we find unique personalities, individuals with distinct characteristics who are affected by life differently. No two people are exactly alike, and the differences define a person’s identity.

A simple aphorism that has been lost in the legal battles that have come to define the opioid epidemic. The individual patient has become a collective mass – a faceless, nameless mass of individuals aggregated for legal convenience. Aggregated to effectively create legal arguments built upon precedent that appears stronger in the court of law.

But in strengthening a legal argument, litigators have diminished the individual impact the opioid epidemic has had on patients. And now that the infamous United States v. Purdue Pharma L.P. case has reached settlement, another battle ensues.

Will the patients who were affected by the opioid epidemic actually benefit from the financial remuneration?

And if they do, how will we calculate the relative allocation of funds per individual?

Critical questions that should define the basis of the settlement, but have been lost in the political hype surrounding the press releases. A settlement in which the company would transition into a non-profit public benefits company, allocating funds to federal and state government organizations that support opioid abuse and overall addiction services.

An ostensibly well-intentioned resolution, but one that remains controversial in the eyes of lawmakers because they feel that it does not sufficiently punish the Sackler family – essentially the faces of Purdue Pharma L.P.

But the purpose of the lawsuit was to address the undue burdens the company’s medication, Oxycontin, and the company’s educational efforts – paying physicians to give speeches – upon individual patients that went on to develop addictions. Yet state prosecutors and lawmakers seem to focus the aggregated impact of the epidemic upon select individuals, instead of focusing on the individual impact to the patient.

As a result, many patients, who agreed to put their addiction story, their medical records into the lawsuit are finding themselves on the outside looking in, wondering if they will actually benefit for their contribution to the lawsuit.

Which is an absolute shame. When you read the various state lawsuits against Purdue Pharma L.P. they almost always cite broad statistics describing how their state was affected. They hardly ever narrow the scope of the impact down to the individual. Yet the names of individuals form the basis of the lawsuits that were aggregated to create one large class action lawsuit.

A tactic used to strengthen the legal argument against the company, and influence the legal proceedings towards an inevitable plea agreement.

But settling cases as an almost default outcome has established legal fluencies that impose artificially uniform healthcare policies that overlook unique differences in the opioid epidemic in different parts of the country and among different patient populations.

The heart of the matter essentially boils down to the following argument – patients were misled into developing addictions by Purdue Pharma L.P. and to compensate for the harms done, the company funds will go into allocating resources to help create programs to mitigate the effects of addiction.

But the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, a division within the Department of Health and Human Services conducted a cost-effectiveness model that found the most effective initiatives were unique to each community – distinctly localized, patient-centric approaches to addiction treatment specifically catered to each unique community.

Exactly the opposite of the legal strategies used in the opioid cases.

Prosecutors and lawmakers in opioid related class action lawsuits aggregated individual cases, picking and choose attributes to combine and attributes to selectively discard as necessary to produce the strongest legal argument possible. Then they targeted smaller pharmaceutical companies, knowing they would settle more easily than larger pharmaceutical companies.

Something that proved to be true as Endo International and Allergan PLC were the first opioid manufacturers to settle. Prosecutors then used the settlements as precedent to strengthen the case against larger pharmaceutical companies who also eventually settled, reiterating the same one legal argument over and over.

In the end the enormity of the cases in aggregate overshadowed the legal validity or relevance of every individual case – it quickly became a numbers game – culminating in the Purdue Pharma L.P. case, in which prosecutors blended all the lawsuits into one class action case regardless of how relevant each individual case may be – even recommending that, “people should file claims even if they are unsure of harm”, turning the lawsuit into a veritable tar-and-feather display.

Legal fluency is like a wave’s momentum that builds upon the growing number of individual case, but not all cases are given equal consideration, and certain cases soon become more impactful than others. And in the final settlements, those cases that were disproportionately represented will receive more favorable settlement terms.

Which will lead to unfair, inequitable distribution of funds across different states impacting the relative effectiveness of addiction treatment programs in some areas of the country relative to other areas. TH consequences of which can be seen by looking at another hotly debated issue – immigration.

Immigration law has a growing impact on the country’s healthcare as Medicaid expenditure on immigrants have grown from 6% to 17% from 2007 to 2017, though not affecting all parts of the country equally. The federal court see 30 to 40 immigration cases a day in New Mexico, but only 30 cases a year in Kansas, illustrating the disparities in immigration cases across different court systems around the country.

And when the Department of Health and Human Services required immigrants seeking residence to prove they can pay for health insurance, the law was motion to be postponed by a federal judge in Oregon, in the name of public interest, affecting both New Mexico and Kansas alike, despite profoundly unique differences in the impact of the decision between the two regions.

In shifting healthcare cases towards pleas and settlements, we shift healthcare into an artificial state of uniformity that overlooks individual patient circumstances that may be profoundly different depending on where they live, the jurisdiction in which a lawsuit was filed, and – of course – the unique medical conditions and circumstances.

Individual legal arguments are no longer adjudicated relative to the individual needs of the patient – instead, by merely presenting an argument, and effectively utilizing the court proceedings to aggregate the argument, nearly any healthcare lawsuit turns into an inevitable plea agreement. But in the process, it turns litigators into court operators, and places an unforeseen, undue burden on patients marginalized in the process, compromising their individual rights and obfuscating the original purpose of the lawsuit.

Physicist Max Planck said, “science advances one funeral at a time”, implying the figurative death of old scientific ideas pave the way for new ideas. Similarly, healthcare dies a figurative death through mandated uniformity, one legal case at a time, conforming individual patient needs into an aggregated, standardized legal argument that does not truly represent any one patient individually – typifying the harmful effects of legal fluency on individual patients in clinical medicine.

Law and healthcare coexist on a delicate balance of aggregated legal fluences and individual patient rights. Lawmakers and prosecutors should be keen to maintain that balance and focus more on the individual patients that form the basis of the lawsuit rather than utilizing legal strategies to strengthen the basis of the legal argument that come at the expense of the individual patient.

ShareTweet
Daily Remedy

Daily Remedy

Dr. Jay K Joshi serves as the editor-in-chief of Daily Remedy. He is a serial entrepreneur and sought after thought-leader for matters related to healthcare innovation and medical jurisprudence. He has published articles on a variety of healthcare topics in both peer-reviewed journals and trade publications. His legal writings include amicus curiae briefs prepared for prominent federal healthcare cases.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Videos

In this episode of the Daily Remedy Podcast, Dr. Jeffrey Singer discusses his book 'Your Body, Your Health Care,' emphasizing the importance of patient autonomy in healthcare decisions. He explores historical cases that shaped medical ethics, the contradictions in harm reduction policies, and the role of the FDA in drug approval processes. Dr. Singer critiques government regulations that infringe on individual autonomy and advocates for a healthcare system that respects patients as autonomous adults. The conversation highlights the need for a shift in how healthcare policies are formulated, focusing on individual rights and self-medication.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Dr. Jeffrey Singer and His Book
01:11 The Importance of Patient Autonomy
10:29 Contradictions in Harm Reduction Policies
20:48 The Role of the FDA in Drug Approval
30:21 Certificate of Need Laws and Their Impact
39:59 The Legacy of Patient Autonomy and the Hippocratic Oath
Your Body, Your Health Care: A Conversation with Dr. Jeffrey Singer
YouTube Video _IWv1EYeJYQ
Subscribe

RFK Jr.’s Overhaul of CDC Vaccine Policy

Visuals

Official MAHA Report

Official MAHA Report

by Daily Remedy
May 31, 2025
0

Explore the official MAHA Report released by the White House in May 2025.

Read more

Twitter Updates

Tweets by DailyRemedy1

Newsletter

Start your Daily Remedy journey

Cultivate your knowledge of current healthcare events and ensure you receive the most accurate, insightful healthcare news and editorials.

*we hate spam as much as you do

Popular

  • The Grey Market of Weight Loss: How Compounded GLP-1 Medications Continue Despite FDA Crackdowns

    The Grey Market of Weight Loss: How Compounded GLP-1 Medications Continue Despite FDA Crackdowns

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • The First FBI Agent I Met

    3 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • Retatrutide: The Weight Loss Drug Everyone Wants—But Can’t Officially Get

    1 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • Generative Scribes and Pervasive Errors: The Promise and Pitfalls of AI-Driven Clinical Notes

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • Continuous Care, Continuous Data: How AI-Powered Remote Monitoring Redefines Diagnostics

    1 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • 628 Followers

Daily Remedy

Daily Remedy offers the best in healthcare information and healthcare editorial content. We take pride in consistently delivering only the highest quality of insight and analysis to ensure our audience is well-informed about current healthcare topics - beyond the traditional headlines.

Daily Remedy website services, content, and products are for informational purposes only. We do not provide medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. All rights reserved.

Important Links

  • Support Us
  • About Us
  • Contact us
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms and Conditions

Newsletter

Start your Daily Remedy journey

Cultivate your knowledge of current healthcare events and ensure you receive the most accurate, insightful healthcare news and editorials.

*we hate spam as much as you do

  • Survey
  • Podcast
  • About Us
  • Contact us

© 2025 Daily Remedy

No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Articles
  • Podcasts
  • Surveys
  • Courses
  • About Us
  • Contact us
  • Support Us
  • Official Learner

© 2025 Daily Remedy

Start your Daily Remedy journey

Cultivate your knowledge of current healthcare events and ensure you receive the most accurate, insightful healthcare news and editorials.

*we hate spam as much as you do