Medical Ethics and Health Policy - A Year in the Blogosphere

Here's what I wrote in my first posting when I started this blog a year ago today: Medical ethics has traditionally focused on the indi...

Drug Trials in India

India is developing drug trials as a budding industrial sector. It is predicted that trials outsourced from the U.S. and Europe will bring $...

Health Insurance and Health Care Cost - a personal experience

Charlie Baker, CEO at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, where I direct the ethics program, has a valuable posting about "Bending the Health...

Harry, Louise, and Medical Ethics

Good news! Harry and Louise are back. And they've changed a lot since they deep-sixed the Clinton health plan in 1994. Their big concern...

Shakespeare and Medical Ethics

In Act V of Romeo and Juliet , Romeo, heartbroken by his (mistaken) belief that Juliet is dead, offers an apothecary 40 ducats for "a d...

West Virginia's Medicaid Redesign and the Ethics of Personal Responsibility

Two years ago, West Virginia launched a Medicaid redesign based on the premise that beneficiaries should be expected to play an active role ...

PhRMA Stops Sabre Rattling in Massachusetts

Three days ago I criticized PhRMA's heavy-handed attack on the relatively mild restrictions Massachusetts Senate Bill 2863 imposes on d...

The Rule of Rescue in the British National Health Service

Today's Daily Telegraph ( here and here ) bitterly attacks NICE (the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence) for not ado...

PhRMA Shoots Itself in the Foot in Massachusetts

Yesterday Massachusetts Governal Deval Patrick signed Senate Bill 2863 , "An Act to promote Cost Containment, Transparency and Efficien...

Hospital Ethics

On reason "ethics" has a bad name is the gap between espoused principles and the behavior of individuals and organizations. Highfa...

Prostate Cancer Screening

In organizational and health system ethics, the public is a key stakeholder. I've thought for a long time that widely held public values...

Immigrants, Refugees, and Medical Ethics

After I wrote yesterday's post about refugees and asylum seekers in the British National Health Service, I read a remarkable article in...

British GPs Demand Right to Treat Refugees

In January I wrote ( here ) about GP resistance to a proposed National Health Service directive that they not treat asylum seekers or undocu...