A Blog Post about Harvard Pilgrim Health Care

I just came upon this post by Paul Levy, who until recently was CEO of the Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital, about Harvard Pilgrim Health Car...

The Ethics of Using Placebos in Clinical Practice

The most interesting research study you may ever read about was published last month in PLoS - "Placebos without Deception: A Randomiz...

WikiLeaks and Medical Ethics

WikiLeaks , the secure website that publishes documents leaked by whistleblowers, has been front page news since it published 92,000 secret ...

Gay Bashing, 12 Step Privacy, and Journalistic Ethics

Lavender, "Minnesota's GLBT Magazine," recently created a firestorm of ethical controversy when it published an article outin...

A Promising Proposal for Reducing Health Care Costs

Bruce Bullen, interim CEO at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, recently made this proposal for the financing of health care reform on his " ...

Should Therapists Snoop in Their Patient's Facebook Site?

A colleague recently asked me this question: What do you think about therapists going to a patient's Facebook site if that site is open ...

Wendell Potter on For-Profit Health Insurance

Wendell Potter, who retired last April from his job as head of communications for the CIGNA health insurance company, has been in the news s...

Immigrant Health and Heart Transplants

I'm still jet lagged from 2 1/2 weeks in Europe, so when I woke up in the dark this morning I sought out the online New York Times for s...

Outing the Rorschach Inkblots (2)

A few weeks ago I wrote about the controversy surrounding the publication in Wikipedia of the ten Rorschach inkblots accompanied by the most...

Outing the Rorschach Inkblots

There's been a free-for-all at Wikipedia over the publication of Herman Rorschach's famous inkblots. When the article initially rep...

Patient Access to the Doctor's Notes

With funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston is starting an "open notes" stu...

Seeing the Hippocratic Oath in a New Light

I've always had trouble with the second paragraph of the Hippocratic Oath : To hold him who has taught me this art as equal to my parent...

Responding to Medical Mistakes in India

For anyone interested in (a) India and (b) medical ethics, (c) the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics (IJME), which is available online , is t...

Fixing American Healthcare - by Dr. Rich Fogoros

In October, when I belatedly came upon Dr. Rich Fogoros's "Covert Rationing" blog, I knew I'd found a kindred spirit. Even...

Straight Talk About Rationing in the British National Health Service

We Yanks can only gasp with admiration at the candor of National Health Service leadership and the British media on the resource allocation ...

Business Ethics and Comparative Effectiveness in Health Care

Although no one designing a health system from scratch would create the hodge podge of employer-based insurance and thousands of insurance c...

Henry Paulson and Health System Trust

The national debate about Secretary Paulson's bailout proposal offers some lessons for the health system. Here are three that jump out f...

Should Health Insurance Cover Services for Autism - an Ethical Analysis

A whole course in health system ethics could be built around the issues raised by an article in yesterday's Boston Globe about insuranc...

Medical Tourism and Medical Ethics - At Home and Abroad

I'm a clinician and an academic. For insights into medical ethics, health policy and the health system, I typically turn to case reports...

Oregon Moves Ahead with Health Care Reform

On September 3 the Oregon Health Fund Board (OHFB) posted a draft of its health care reform proposal - "Aim High: Building a Healthy O...