By I. Glenn Cohen There is a deepening crisis in the funding of legal services in the United States. The House of Representatives has proposed cutting the budget of the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), one of the main funders of legal assistance to America’s poor, to an all time low in inflation-adjusted terms. Other sources…
By Susannah Rose During my many years in healthcare as a clinician, researcher and hospital ethics consultant, I am dismayed by how little relative attention is given to ensuring that surrogate decision-makers (or “proxies”) have the “capacity” to make sound medical decisions for adult patients without decision-making capacity. Some attention has been given to this…
By Casey Thomson From policy adoption at the federal level to debate over the health concerns of political figures, this week’s round-up focuses largely on the news for bioethics and health law in the realm of politics. Dan Vorhaus (@genomicslawyer) posted a feature on the history of gene patent litigation and implications for next-generation sequencing technologies.…
[Ed. Note: We’re happy to announce that after a great month of guest blogging, Chris Robertson will be joining Bill of Health as a regular contributor.] By Christopher Robertson The New York Times brings us an interesting story about a new brain scan technology that allows the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease. Below the fold, I…
By Scott Burris You’ve probably heard about the good news/bad news experience of Stephanie Bongiovi, daughter of rocker Jon Bon Jovi. A college student, she ODed on heroin, but help was summoned and she’s going to be fine. The (temporary) bad news for her (and longer term for others in her plight) is that she and…
By Susannah Rose The Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care recently published a report entitled, “What Kind of Physician Will You Be?: Variation in Health Care and Its Importance for Residency Training.” (2012; https://www.dartmouthatlas.org/pages/residency). Briefly, this report analyzes Medicare data to create indexes and variables used to describe varying levels of treatment intensity, particularly at the…
By Scott Burris There’s so much we still don’t know about the prescription opioid problem. The partial remedies advanced so far reflect this: Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs, which in essence define the problem as doctor-shopping patients; treatment guidelines, which define the problem as doctors without expertise; and crackdowns on “pill-mills,” which see the issue as…
By Arthur Caplan Weighing in on Question 2, Massachusetts’ ballot initiative on physician-assisted suicide, Art Caplan says we should vote “yes”: Mass. should legalize physician-assisted suicide Of the numerous ballot initiatives that will be decided at the state level on Tuesday, none is more hotly contested than the Massachusetts bill to decide whether to legalize physician-assisted…
by Jonathan J. Darrow Until recently, most ordinary people had never heard of “pharmacy compounding.” Then, a number of deaths and illnesses caused by a drug that was compounded in a Framingham, Massachusetts pharmacy propelled drug compounding to the national spotlight (see, e.g., Denise Grady et al., Scant Oversight of Drug Maker in Fatal Meningitis…
By Erin Talati As Holly Lynch describes in her recent post, the upcoming election brings a number of bioethics questions directly to the public. Two of the three ballot questions in Massachusetts invite discussion and debate on the controversial issues of physician-assisted suicide and the medical use of marijuana. The introduction of these issues as…
