What causes of action against Hospital Authority physicians, when they refuse to prescribe all necessary medications that can be dispensed for free? Premises and Postulations The patient must pay to consult with Hospital Authority (&quot;HA&quot;) physicians, but deservedly and legitimately need the myriad medications that Patient is requesting from HA. Hypothetical fact pattern HA clinics dispense medications for free, including minerals and vitamins. According to news reports and consumer complaints, some HA physicians are too stingy. These miserly physicians refuse to prescribe all of Patients needed medications. When patients request them all, these Patients try to shoo them. These HA physicians show them door and allege Please buy these medications at a pharmacy. Then patients bring up their low income, or stress that they cannot find a pharmacy that sells them. But these physicians still try to cast Patients out. I am not willing to prescribe so much on a single consultation, even if you are impoverished. I advise you to consult a private doctor or a private hospital, or formally complain to the Hospital Authority. Threatening to complain fails to solve the problem. These skinflint physicians won't budge. Patients who complained to HA before find the complaints process too sluggish and useless. HA's solution is to book another consultation — HA is just asking Patients to try their luck, and to stumble on a kindhearted doctor. HA forbids patients from requesting a specific Physician. HA doesn't guarantee Patients can see the same Physician. Indubitably, patients must not need to debate tightfisted physicians, or be brushed off — particularly if they are too ill or unable to debate! Questions Ought these patients to rely on Contract? Or Tort? Or both? Contract law applies, because the HA's Fees and Charges are contractual consideration. What causes of actions do Patients have against these pinchfists Physicians? I am seeking details, not just a vague or short answer introducing the tort of (medical) negligence. Undoubtedly, Patients are interested in convincing Physicians to prescribe these medications during their consultation, not to sue them after.
The doctor is a professional Engineers don’t put extra wings on airplanes because the client asks. Lawyers don’t throw unsubstantiated allegations in their pleadings because the client asks. Accountants don’t change the balance sheet because the client asks. And doctors don’t prescribe unnecessary medications or vitamins because the client asks. For most people with normal health and a relatively balanced diet, nutritional supplements are medically unnecessary. They may make the user feel better through the placebo affect but doctors prescribe things that are necessary, not things the patient wants but doesn’t need. You can sue a doctor if they are negligent. One sure sign of negligence is if they adopt the treatment plan proposed by the patient without applying their professional judgement.
united-statestexas In the US, it depends on the consent-to-treat laws of the state. In Washington, under RCW 9.02.100, everybody has a right to reproductive privacy (be it contraceptives or abortions). Under the federal HIPAA privacy rule, the minor requesting contraceptives would therefore be &quot;the individual&quot;, which means that disclosure to others requires consent from the patient. Given the supremacy clause, that's all she wrote for Washington. The majority of states similarly allow 16 year olds to request contraceptives. Texas Family Code §32.003 spells out the conditions where a minor can consent to their own medical treatment, which does not include the situation you describe, therefore parental consent would be required (which clearly implies parental notification). Furthermore, that law also says (d) A licensed physician, dentist, or psychologist may, with or without the consent of a child who is a patient, advise the parents, managing conservator, or guardian of the child of the treatment given to or needed by the child. Therefore in Texas there is no prohibition against informing the parent(s). (Note that in the Texas Family Code, &quot;child&quot; is a synonym for &quot;minor&quot;, so this also applies to teenagers, not just small children.) Carey v. Population Services Int'l, 431 U.S. 678 is an important ruling regarding the rights of minors to make their own decisions regarding contraception, but it does not go so far as to declare that minors have a constitutional right to give consent to the requisite medical examination.
If that person becomes incapacitated or is deemed unfit to make their own decisions, will I be required to be physically present (for example, to sign something) to make those decisions if called upon? While it is customary for someone making decisions as weighty as removal of life support, to come to the hospital or care facility in person and discuss the issues with treating physicians, it isn't required. When you are physically there it is easier for you to personally assess the patient's condition rather than just taking someone else's word for it, and you have more informal access to everything that is going on in terms of people coming in and out of the patient's room, providers you wouldn't have known to speak to initiating conversations with you (e.g. there is typically an ER nurse for each shift, several residents doing rounds checking on a patient, and often also an outside specialist doctor involved in the treatment team). It is also usually easy when you are physically in a hospital to locate someone knowledgable and familiar with the kinds of issues you are facing at the moment to provide spiritual and religious guidance if you feel this would help you make your decision, while your neighborhood clergy person may not have a good understanding of these issues since they don't come up as often for someone is doesn't frequently spend time around people being treated in hospitals or hospices. And, this kind of pastoral counseling requires not just religious knowledge but an understanding of the options that are being presented through the lens of what is religiously and morally important about the differences between the different options. When I was an attorney for a hospital handling these issues for the hospital, we would have been willing to work with an out of state medical power of attorney agent without their physical presence. But, the fact that this was deep in the Rocky Mountains far from other urban areas (i.e. Grand Junction, Colorado) may have influenced a willingness to be flexible since it would often take a lot of time and money for someone to arrive in person. Also, while the medical power of attorney gives a specific person authority to act, an advanced medical directive is simply a document that goes into a patient's medical record that advises treating providers of the patient's intent and doesn't actually need next of kin approval or a medical power of attorney agent's say so to implement, although better practice is to seek that consent first in case there are any reasons why that advanced medical directive might have been procured improperly from someone lacking capacity or subsequently revoked. There usually will be forms for a medical power of attorney agent to sign, not authorizing a particular medical procedure, but authorizing treatment in general and providing personal and financial information about the patient in connection with admitting that person. But, these days, hospitals are relatively comfortable with handling that paperwork via fax or scanned copies sent via email, and some of the more flexible hospitals will even accept photos of signed documents sent via text message.
Another possible answer: The legal profession is a cartel, protected by laws. "Unlicensed/Unauthorized Practice of Law" is a big enough issue that its acronym (UPL) is well known among people who discuss law. Non-lawyers may decline to provide legal advice because they don't want to be charged with UPL. Likewise, as a matter of policy (at least in the U.S.) most government agencies and many employers in businesses that frequently receive requests for legal information instruct their employees to avoid giving anything that could be construed as legal advice. Which policy employees might cite to avoid helping with requests for even the most basic legal information.
In the US, a patent holder has no obligation at all to use their patent. They can charge as much for their patented product as they want, and if there are no alternatives then they're in a pretty good market position. If Intel wants to make more microchips and ASML won't sell them the tools they need, Intel just has to offer more money. It's a monopoly, but that's the whole reason patents exist: giving inventors a monopoly on their inventions in exchange for publishing how they work. There is such a thing as using a patent anticompetitively, but it takes a lot more than charging a high price. Your Pfizer example runs up against one of the limits of patents, though. Patents are a government-supported monopoly, and they're only useful as long as the government keeps supporting them. A government has the sovereign power to say &quot;we're not going to enforce this patent.&quot; If the company has facilities in that country, the government even has the power to say &quot;you must manufacture more of this product.&quot; This is rare. Most countries are subject to the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement), which says they will provide a patent system that's also available to foreigners. But TRIPS allows countries to authorize the unlicensed use of patents to supply their domestic market under appropriate circumstances. The patent owner still has to be paid a fair amount, but the patent isn't ironclad. Countries can also issue compulsory patent licenses to produce drugs for export to other countries, again under appropriate circumstances. You could also have an ad hoc agreement between WTO members to make new TRIPS rules for something. This last option was actually discussed to waive COVID-19 vaccine protection worldwide, although it didn't end up happening. If Pfizer was charging $1,000,000 per dose, it probably would have happened. As was said in the comments, the Pfizer example was extreme. If Intel can't expand chip production because of ASML's patent, that's basically a commercial problem and should be solved by paying ASML more money. If people can't get COVID vaccines because Pfizer charges too much, that's a humanitarian problem and can be solved through government intervention.
The federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) may apply to you and provide certain rights. HIPAA does seem to cover part of this, though if it covers you particularly and the lab that performed the test is a separate question. On the Department of Health and Human Services website discussing HIPAA, they outline requirements discussing pre-employment drug tests. Basically, your authorization is required in order to release the results of the drug test to your employer and there is nothing prohibiting the employer from conditioning employment on your provision of that authorization. This seems to indicate that the drug test is a medical record. In another section on the same web site concerning your medical records, it outlines that the Privacy Rule gives you the general right to inspect, review and receive a copy of your medical records if the health care provider is covered by the Privacy Rule. You can read about the privacy rule on yet another section of that web site. Generally speaking, the privacy rule applies to any health care provider that transmits health records electronically. Certain exceptions to the rule apply, however determining what those exceptions happen to be is a more difficult task. You will notice from the hhs.gov web site that any entity that is covered by the privacy act is required to give you a privacy practices notice (with certain exceptions). If you didn't receive a privacy practices notice then the entity conducting the drug test is probably not covered by HIPAA. If you did receive a privacy practices notice then the entity conducting the test is covered by HIPAA and you have a right to review your records.
The parties don't need to explicitly agree on the price beforehand, unless a law explicitly requires it for a specific kind of transaction. Contracts do not need to have all terms explicitly spelled out for those terms to be binding; it is expected that dental care has a cost, and if you don't explicitly specify the cost then it's assumed you're willing to pay a reasonable fee. They can't charge you six million dollars for a bandage, but there's a very wide range of fees considered "reasonable" for a doctor to charge. If you care more about the price, it's your responsibility to work these things out yourself before saying "yes." The dentist does not need to make you sign a written contract saying it's your job to check, because when you agreed to the care without asking about the price you already agreed to pay whatever would be charged (subject to the fact that courts will not enforce an unconscionable contract). California law requires hospitals to provide someone without insurance a written estimate of healthcare costs upon request, as well as requiring any hospital with a master list of charges for services to make it available to the public and to give anyone (on request) a list of average charges for 25 common outpatient services. It does not require medical charges to be set out in advance without a request, just like other fields of commerce aren't generally required to do that.
There is, as far as I can see, no Crown exemption from the sale of goods acts (including the International Sale of Goods Conventions), but unfortunately for this patient the NHS has no liability either in logic or in law. The doctor provided a written prescription, for which there is no charge, and which allows patients to buy certain drugs. The patient took the prescription to a chemist's, which (for money) provided the drug specified in it. Even if the patient had noticed that the prescription was for the wrong form of medicine, the pharmacist has no discretion to alter it; if the prescription specifies tablets, the patient can either buy the tablets or not buy them and take the prescription back to the doctor. In neither case has either the doctor or the chemist committed any conceivable offence regarding sale of goods. (There might theoretically be a case for negligence, but it would never be worth either suing a doctor for an £8 prescription fee or reporting him to the authorities for writing a prescription for the right drug in the wrong form).