Events

In a healthcare system with scarce resources, profit that exceeds the value of what is being paid for cries out for justifications. The Biden Harris Administration, along with democrats in Congress, have been moving towards a vision of health reform that reorders whose profit we question and how we do so.  The Medicare Drug Price Negotiation Program, created by the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, is a relatively new program that allows Medicare to begin negotiating with drug companies to determine the maximum fair price for a small set of drugs. The methods for conducting these negotiations represent a significant step forward in a dramatic and important reordering of how we view the healthcare financing system, allowing us to consider rational, coherent concepts of value without having to necessarily privilege the concerns of wealthy investors as we have done in the past. Professor Fox is proposing extrapolating from this and similar recent reform proposals to create a rubric for a more fair, just, and rational constraint of the power of those who currently set prices in all parts of the healthcare system.

Jacqueline Fox is a professor of law at the Joseph F. Rice School of Law at the University of South Carolina.  She received her JD and LLM from Georgetown University, was a postdoctoral Greenwall Fellow at Johns Hopkins and Georgetown Universities, and a Donaghue Visiting Scholar in Research Ethics at Yale University. She recently completed a Fulbright Global Scholar fellowship at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at Oxford University and Melbourne Law School.  Her research interests focus on the intersection of the law and policy of healthcare financing mechanisms and bioethics. Her current project is a comparative study of methods used to calculate the amount of money spent on healthcare and how these methods can do harm and good.