Health Worker's Religious Freedom, Patient Rights, and Ethical Deliberation

Today's Washington Post article about a budding Bush administration proposal to extend the rights of health care workers to opt out of ...

Joint Replacement, Medicare, and the Ethics of Arrogance

Our national failure to establish a registry to track the performance of artificial joints points to a little discussed value that drags dow...

Involving Consumers in Research and Evaluation

An article about “Client Involvement in Public Administration Research and Evaluation” by my friends Rick Beinecke (Department of Public Ma...

Conflict of Interest in the American Psychiatric Association

Today I experienced the impact of conflict of interest on trust first hand. Sadly, it involves the professional society I have belonged to f...

Deliberating about Hard Choices in Massachusetts

All societies must set limits on health care. But how can they do it in a clinically informed, ethically justifiable, and politically accept...

Obama out on a health care limb

Barack Obama has put himself out on a limb with regard to health care costs. That's a good thing. Obama has committed himself to saving ...

Baby Boomers and Health Care Reform

I read always interesting Nicholas Kristof's New York Times op-ed on " Geezers Doing Good " over coffee this morning. The sent...

Prozac for Pets and Health Care Reform

In my section of Harvard Medical School’s required first year course in “Medical Ethics and Professionalism” this spring, we opened several ...

Experimental Cancer Treatments in the National Health Service

Today’s Times of London has a poignant article by Andrew Lawson, a 48 year old pain medicine consultant in the British National Health Serv...

Parity for Mental Health Benefits

Sherry Glied and Richard Frank, two of the leading experts on mental health policy, have an important article on parity in the July 10 issu...

Value-based Insurance Design

Value-based insurance design (VBID), in which cost sharing varies with the value of the health services, is (I hope) the wave of the future...

Avastin 1/Cost Control 0

An excellent article about the cancer drug Avastin in the July 6 New York Times provides an lucid overview of the scientific status of the ...

Massachusetts Health Care Reform – Where the Wild Things Are

A line in Maurice Sendak’s classic – “Where the Wild Things Are” – describes the current situation for the Massachusetts health care reform ...