donal brown

Hospitals will have to disclose the discounts they are negotiating with insurance companies, enabling patients to seek lower rates for a range of medical services, the Trump administration announced this week. These negotiations have always been secret with hospitals and insurers claiming they were proprietary information. The hospital industry is expected to challenge the rule in court.  (The New York Times, July 29, 2019, by Reed Abelson and Abby Goodnough) The new rule would require

Media Law Professor Frank D. LoMonte, CNN, June 12, 2019, writes that the Trump administration has clamped down on workers’ rights and seems ready to weaken a section of the 85-year-old National Labor Relations Act that protected the free speech rights of private-sector workers to discuss their working conditions with each other, friends and the media. The act has long been seen as essential to employees in enlisting the public to improve the workplace. A clampdown

National Public Radio and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press is asking the Supreme Court to release unredacted briefs in a case in which the court refused a stay in an execution of a murderer convicted in Alabama. The information the court withheld concerned the drugs and methods Alabama uses in its executions. The reporters committee said the redactions were unprecedented and made independently of Alabama officials who did not insist on them.

A federal district judge dismissed charges on First Amendment grounds against white nationalists charged with inciting riots across California. The judge found the Anti-Riot Act “unconstitutionally overbroad in violation of the First Amendment.” The judge found no relevance of the white nationalists’ statements to violence in Berkeley in April of 2017. Members of the white nationalist group The Rise Above Movement have attacked protesters and journalists at political protests. (Courthouse News Service, June 3, 2019, by Nathan

A New York Daily News editorial, June 5, 2019, alerted readers to an upcoming ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court on the right of corporations with government contracts to decide which information to disclose to the public. The case involved the South Dakota Sioux Falls Argus Leader seeking information about federal food stamps spent at local stores. The Food Marketing Institute representing retailers sued to keep the information secret without showing that the disclosure could harm