The Freedom to Spend Your Own Money on Medical Care: A Common Casualty of Universal Coverage

Most people would agree that a patient should always be able to spend his own money on the health care services he desires. Yet that freedom is often threatened or denied when government tries to provide universal health insurance coverage, as in the U.S. Medicare program, which provides health insurance to seniors and people with disabilities. Over the past 20 years, the Medicare bureaucracy -- and to a lesser extent Congress itself -- has limited the freedom of Medicare beneficiaries to purchase medical services with their own money. Those limitations violate beneficiaries' right to privacy, undermine a tool that could reduce the burden Medicare imposes on taxpayers, and may deny care to Medicare beneficiaries outright, or deny them access to the highest quality care available. Ironically, as the U.S. government has restricted the ability of patients to spend their own money on medical care, Canada's socialized health care system is moving in the opposite direction. In a landmark case handed down in 2005, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the province of Quebec could not prohibit its citizens from purchasing covered services through private health insurance. That ruling recognized that imposing limits on a patient's freedom to spend his own money can result in his being denied crucial and even life-saving medical services. This threat to patients' rights would grow under many proposals to have the federal or state governments provide universal coverage. Congress and the state legislatures should avoid universal coverage schemes that would undermine this fundamental human right, or tempt future legislatures and bureaucrats to do so. Instead, Congress should restore to American seniors the unfettered right to spend their own money on medical care

Mobihealth: mobile health services based on body area networks

In this chapter we describe the concept of MobiHealth and the approach developed during the MobiHealth project (MobiHealth, 2002). The concept was to bring together the technologies of Body Area Networks (BANs), wireless broadband communications and wearable medical devices to provide mobile healthcare services for patients and health professionals. These technologies enable remote patient care services such as management of chronic conditions and detection of health emergencies. Because the patient is free to move anywhere whilst wearing the MobiHealth BAN, patient mobility is maximised. The vision is that patients can enjoy enhanced freedom and quality of life through avoidance or reduction of hospital stays. For the health services it means that pressure on overstretched hospital services can be alleviated

Promoting global Internet freedom: policy and technology

This report provides information about US government and private sector efforts to promote and support global Internet freedom and a description of Internet freedom legislation and hearings from the 112th Congress. Modern communication tools such as the Internet provide a relatively inexpensive, accessible, easy-entry means of sharing ideas, information, and pictures around the world. In a political and human rights context, in closed societies when the more established, formal news media is denied access to or does not report on specified news events, the Internet has become an alternative source of media, and sometimes a means to organize politically. The openness and the freedom of expression allowed through social networking sites, as well as the blogs, video sharing sites, and other tools of today’s communications technology, have proven to be an unprecedented and often disruptive force in some closed societies. Governments that seek to maintain their authority and control the ideas and information their citizens receive are often caught in a dilemma: they feel that they need access to the Internet to participate in commerce in the global market and for economic growth and technological development, but fear that allowing open access to the Internet potentially weakens their control over their citizens. Internet freedom can be promoted in two ways, through legislation that mandates or prohibits certain activities, or through industry self regulation. Current legislation under consideration by Congress, the Global Online Freedom Act of 2011 (H.R. 3605), would prohibit or require reporting of the sale of Internet technologies and provision of Internet services to “Internetrestricting countries” (as determined by the State Department). Some believe, however, that technology can offer a complementary and, in some cases, better and more easily implemented solution to ensuring Internet freedom. They argue that hardware and Internet services, in and of themselves, are neutral elements of the Internet; it is how they are implemented by various countries that is repressive. Also, Internet services are often tailored for deployment to specific countries; however, such tailoring is done to bring the company in line with the laws of that country, not with the intention of allowing the country to repress and censor its citizenry. In many cases, that tailoring would not raise many questions about free speech and political repression. This report provides information about federal and private sector efforts to promote and support global Internet freedom and a description of Internet freedom legislation and hearings from the 112th Congress. Three appendixes suggest further reading on this topic and describe censorship and circumvention technologies

FREEDOM TO PROVIDE LOBBYING SERVICES IN THE INTERNAL MARKET – A REGULATORY CHALLENGE FOR EU MEMBER STATES

Lobbying profession comes face to face with issue of its legal defi ning. Considering the increasing role of lobbyists in decision-making processes at the EU level, lack or heterogeneity of national legal solutions in the area of provision of lobbying services seems to be quite a problem for persons engaged in those activities. Paper deals with issues of single defi nition of lobbying. Paper analyses sources of EU law related to provision of lobbying services. Paper deals with problem of lack of harmonised regulation of lobbying profession in the EU Member States. Aim of the paper is to investigate are there any special provisions on lobbying services at the EU level. Aim of this paper is also to investigate how does lack of regulation of lobbying influence provision of lobbying services. Reconciling different legal approaches seems as a challenge for EU Member States. Paper concludes that lack of harmonised regulation at the EU level can be deterrent for provision of lobbying services and can decrease the level of transparency in decision making processes

Totalizzazione e libera prestazione di servizi = Freedom to provide services. WP C.S.D.L.E. “Massimo D’Antona”.INT – 151/2020

The contribution analyzes the discipline of social security protection for professionals in the Community framework. Specifically, the provisions of Regulation 883/2004 / EC and 987/2009/EC are compared with the rationales behind social security institutions and with the internal and community rules on the exercise of the profession and taxation

Dock labor schemes in the context of EU law and policy

The organization of dock labor and, more in particular, the use of dock labor schemes has been under EU scrutiny for a long while. The EU however has not come with clear-cut answers so far. The diversity of dock labor schemes existing in Europe is an important factor in assessing their compatibility with EU law. The compliance of dock labor schemes with internal market principles such as the freedom to provide services and the freedom of establishment has not been put to the direct test of European jurisprudence yet. It was the European Commission’s Directive proposal on port services that put the principle of freedom to provide services centre-stage. This paper sets out the EU legal and policy framework that applies to dock labor schemes. It also gives an extensive analysis of how dock labor interests contributed to the failure of the port services’ Directive. It further describes the process that emerged after the downfall of the Directive, including the proposal to set up a European social dialogue on port labor. Finally, it gives insight in ways in which European policy-makers may address the issue in the future.peer-reviewe

Production/maintenance cooperative scheduling using multi-agents and fuzzy logic

Within companies, production is directly concerned with the manufacturing schedule, but other services like sales, maintenance, purchasing or workforce management should also have an influence on this schedule. These services often have together a hierarchical relationship, i.e. the leading function (most of the time sales or production) generates constraints defining the framework within which the other functions have to satisfy their own objectives. We show how the multi-agent paradigm, often used in scheduling for its ability to distribute decision-making, can also provide a framework for making several functions cooperate in the schedule performance. Production and maintenance have been chosen as an example: having common resources (the machines), their activities are actually often conflicting. We show how to use a fuzzy logic in order to model the temporal degrees of freedom of the two functions, and show that this approach may allow one to obtain a schedule that provides a better compromise between the satisfaction of the respective objectives of the two functions

Editorial Freedom: Editors, Retailers, and Access to the Mass Media

When confronted with regulations which permit others to have access to their media, cable television system owners, among others, have challenged such rules as abridging their first amendment right to editorial freedom. The author analyzes this defense by examining exactly what editorial freedom is, and why it is protected. He argues that editorial freedom is best understood as the right of consumers to receive information effectively, and thus to employ editors to provide so called editorial functions. After noting that these services are analogous to those generally provided by retailers, the author discusses the editorial functions performed by cable operators. The author then evaluates whether, according to this framework, various media access rules interfere with editorial freedom