By: Mahmud Adam Danjuma
It’s a very big shame for our leaders of today to only focus on trivialities and misplaced priorities over their tours to other countries, conventions, visitations, etc., yet there is no change in the government generally. We have seen a lot of struggles done by many countries to keep their citizens safe, and despite what we all know about this, things continue to fall apart. Therefore, it should be noted that the health of a human being cannot be overemphasized, and that’s why it’s called a fundamental human right, which is actionable per se, unlike some other rights in the constitution, which we call a right merely.
In this regard, there are five distinct characteristics of the American health law system that Nigerians would need to consider to make the lives and health of humans paramount, other than the way people die like chickens.
As long as one gets ill and seeks help from people who claim to be experts or relatively experts, in that regard, that kind of relationship predates law, even health law itself. Notwithstanding, labor law, environmental law, and housing law can be considered health laws because where we live and the way we work affect our health. Also, medical research on new therapies is essential to health law. Here are the five features:
1.Symbiotic relationship with medical authorities: here you see the legal interactions with medical authorities, governing structures in medical practices, and interrelationships between lawyers and judges exercising one form of professional authority. The relationship between lawyers and doctors cannot be shattered, though there are some instances where lawyers and doctors are on opposite sides. Therefore, legal rules have been very important to the medical authorities.
2.Draws on multiple laws: Laws in the USA are made in multiple ways. The legislature can pass a statute, and expert agencies can issue rules, decisions, or approvals. Judges and juries can decide a case at a time through a jury verdict. Therefore, their health law embraces all of this, just as other areas of law embrace some of those institutional forms. As we study them in health law, especially where statutes are passed in the area of law,.
3.Dynamic and contested: whatever we say health law has given, it’s subject to change because what history has shown is that health law is the most dynamic law. And what it tries to achieve is a “human form of insensitive effects,” trying to create both the practice of medicine, better patient access, and privacy rules. Therefore, values and cultures change. We should expect our medical system to change, e.g., the law of patient autonomy and informed patient consent has changed dramatically over the past 50 years because many physicians and researchers regarded it as not so desirable to tell a patient what is wrong with him or her. Today, they consider it anathema and illegal.
4. Institutional forms and multiplicity: US law in the context of health law does not have different forms, statutes, cases, or agencies, but they work within our federal, state, and local systems. The health law system in the US is not nationalized even after the Affordable Care Act, and it would be false to say that the state controls all the most important aspects of health law.
5. Rules operate simultaneously: To knit all the four mentioned together, they work concurrently and simultaneously in the United States.
Therefore, the federal government doesn’t wait for what the state does or vice versa, and the local government doesn’t wait for what the state does or vice versa. Health law is the most challenging area of law and, of course, the most interesting area of law, as it triggers questions about what type of health law we want in the future.
Mahmud Adam Danjuma is a recent graduate of Usmanu Danfodiyo University Sokoto
I can be reached via:
07066505804
mahmudadam122@gmail.com