Tragic Choices at Grady Hospital

On October 3, Grady Hospital in Atlanta closed its dialysis clinic. Grady committed itself to cover the cost of dialysis for three months fo...

The Ethics of Virtual Medical Visits

OptumHealth , a division of UnitedHealthGroup , will soon be offering a web-based platform for connecting patients and doctors by video. Whe...

Via Pollster.com , here are some interesting overview articles about health care polling, from Frank Newport of Gallup ( link ) and Bruce Dr...

Medical Culture and Costs at UCLA

An article about the cost of end-of-life care in this morning's New York Times focuses on the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. UCLA ha...

Political strategist Mark Mellman has produced a memo for Democratic party senators , summarizing polling results that he claims demonstrate...

Patient Safety, Ethics, and Psychiatry

This fall I was asked to discuss a case for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Mortality and Morbidity Rounds - a web-based pati...

Crunch Time in Health Care Reform

We're in the end game of health care reform. As I said in my last post , we're seeing real debate in the Senate, but - unfortunately...

How "P.O.'d" are Voters at the Dropping of the P.O.?

Early this week, word began filtering down from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) that all semblance of the public option (opt-out, t...

Empty Republican Rhetoric on Health Reform

I've just read " Health Care Reform - A Republican View ," by Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley, in today's online edition of th...

Facebook Friends, Judges, and Conflict of Interest

Florida's Judicial Ethics Advisory Committee was recently asked the following question: Whether a judge may add lawyers who may appear b...

Breaking Down Nov-Dec Decline in Support for HC Reform

As many observers have noted, support in public opinion polls for the overall health care reform bills before Congress has slipped several p...

Will Reducing Health Care Costs Kill Patients?

David Leonhardt, economics columnist for the New York Times, continues to do superb reporting and analysis of our health system. Print journ...

Pollster.com's Mark Blumenthal has an essay today on the recent decline in support for general health care reform, with a focus on the ...

Problems for Medicine as a Self-Regulating Profession

Professions are occupations that society believes (a) serve vital human needs, (b) require a high level of knowledge, judgment and skill, (c...

A component of the latest Senate proposal to expand health insurance coverage is to let 55-64 year-olds purchase a policy under Medicare , ...

Massachusetts Association of Health Plans Ethics Forum

Yesterday I attended a goodbye party for Dr. Marylou Buyse, who has been President and CEO of the Massachusetts Association of Health Plans ...

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 " ...

A Practical Approach to Organizational Ethics

I've been meeting with a number of organizations to help them develop new ways to deal with the ethical dimensions of their activities. ...

Hope for the Holidays

Bring It On 2010 With the country seemingly fomenting from one crisis to the next this past year, many of us are looking forward to a new be...