To Fight the Coronavirus, Cut the Red Tape

Two economists suggest suspending these 5 types of regulations because they are slowing the medical response to the pandemic. And they are asking for more ideas.

By Sendhil Mullainathan and Richard H. Thaler in The NY Times. Excerpt:

"We have identified five kinds of regulations that we believe are hindering us in what amounts to a war of survival. They should be paused for now, and some might be usefully eliminated forever.

There are undoubtedly others we have missed, and we ask for your suggestions about those, too.

Fully deploy all qualified medical professionals.

We face an acute shortage of medical workers, yet red tape is keeping people who could help on the sidelines.

One example is medical licensing, which, in the United States, is done at the state level. Qualified professionals licensed in one state cannot practice if they happen to have moved somewhere else. Let’s instead treat medical licenses like we do driver’s licenses. New York State has already implemented this policy.

Other regulations restrict who can do which tasks. In this emergency, licenses should be extended across specialties. All doctors begin by receiving the same general training, but then go on to specialize in a particular form of medicine. But when someone on an airplane is having a heart attack, the flight attendant doesn’t ask if there’s a cardiologist on the plane.

The same principle can be expanded more broadly. Nurses, physician assistants and even advanced medical students are capable of doing more than the law allows them to do. Let’s use everyone’s skills and also provide crash training programs to provide emergency help when we get swamped.

If a patient will die without medical help, she will care more about the competence than the educational degrees of the person aiding her. We are not suggesting that plumbers be allowed to do surgery, but rather that health systems be able make the call about who can help in the heat of battle.

The times require all qualified hands on deck.

Put a temporary ban on coronavirus malpractice suits.

In the United States and most other countries, anyone who helps out in a roadside accident, earthquake or similar medical crisis is protected from subsequent legal second-guessing by good Samaritan laws. Without such laws, doctors fearing a medical malpractice suit might fail to help.

The same principle should be applied throughout the Covid-19 crisis. Many difficult decisions will have to be made regarding who receives treatment and by whom. Medical workers are already volunteering for hazardous duty; why expose them and their employers to the additional risk of a lawsuit?

To accelerate innovation, suspend patents.

A hospital in Brescia, Italy, had an urgent need for valves necessary to hook up a patient to a ventilator. An enterprising start-up figured out a way to produce the valves with a 3-D printer and made 100 of them in a day, which it donated to the local hospital. Ten patients were treated immediately.

That raw creativity was rewarded with the threat of a lawsuit by the owner of the patent on these valves even though they had been unable to supply them.

Suppliers that cannot meet the demand for their product, be it ventilators, masks or gowns, do not lose any money if others figure out ways to jump in and temporarily fill the gap. Let’s not punish creative heroes.

Patents should be briefly suspended for the production of anything deemed necessary to fight this virus. Each country — including the United States — should look into suspending their patents globally. After the crisis is over, intellectual property rights can be restored, and any firm that decides to stay in the industry should then be required to start paying normal patent license fees. Those Italian valve innovators said they had no intention of continuing in that business. They were just trying to help."