Emergency Room Meditations

My wife and I are hosting a close friend from India - a poet and professor who is doing readings at several U.S. colleges. Yesterday after h...

Solving the U.S. Health Care Mess

Neither Obama's nor McCain's health plans comes to grips with the out-of-control U.S. health system. I don't blame them. The pub...

Psychiatry, Pharma and Conflict of Interest

I've been critical of the way psychiatry and the American Psychiatric Association (APA) have handled conflict of interest over drug comp...

Why Health Plans Should Have Ethics Programs

On Thursday I'll be speaking about "Ethics, Health Plans, and State Health Plan Associations" at the AHIP (America's Healt...

Market and Rights in the Colombian Health Care System (2)

I wrote my first post about Colombia prior to attending the Colombian Health Economics Association conference. I'm writing this follow-...

Market and Rights in the Colombian Health Care System

I’ll be in Bogota this week, speaking to the Colombian Health Economics Association about the ethics of resource allocation and rationing. I...

Catholic & Secular Values in the British National Health Service (2)

In December I wrote about conflict over reproductive ethics at "John and Lizzie's," a well-known Catholic hospital in London....

Bailout and Psychiatric Ethics

I haven't read the fine print of the economic bailout bill, but I learned from the New York Times and Wall Street Journal that in orde...

Senator Grassley, Psychiatric Ethics, and Conflict of Interest

Senator Charles Grassley, ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, is on the warpath about conflict of interest in psychiatry. Mo...

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 ...