By Elizabeth Guo Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Civil Rights (OCR) released a proposed rule implementing section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Section 1557 applies the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 to the ACA so that a covered entity cannot discriminate against an individual on the basis…
By Kelsey Berry This week, a research group in China published a paper describing a significant step forward in one application of the genome editing technique CRISPR: they used it to modify the genome of non-viable human embryos. Now, the scientific community finds itself grasping for ethical and legal foundations in order to evaluate the implications of this work and its…
By Kelsey Berry One of my previous blogs discussed how potentially discriminatory practices in insurance design may continue to dissuade people with high-cost conditions from enrolling in insurance plans, even in a post-ACA world. Last week, colleagues Haiden A. Huskamp, Howard H. Goldman, Colleen L. Barry and I published new findings in Psychiatric Services on the same issue, except with…
By Kelsey Berry It’s time to talk about discrimination again — this time, in insurance benefit design. A recent study in NEJM by Jacobs and Sommers has coined the term “adverse tiering” to describe the use of drug formularies by insurers “not to influence enrollees’ drug utilization but rather to deter certain people from enrolling…
By Kelsey Berry Whereas “allocation of scarce resources” is a buzz phrase that inspires a great deal of distress and desire for good ethical argument, “waste avoidance” strikes us as a relatively uncontroversial method for containing health care spending. Perhaps this is because rationing implies a trade-off between two individuals, each of whom have the potential to…
By Kelsey Berry A few weeks ago, I posted on this blog a discussion of an ethical dilemma in the treatment of Ebola-infected pregnant women in West Africa. I wanted to follow-up with two brief updates concerning Ebola and pregnancy in West Africa. First, Medecins Sans Frontieres has opened the first care center specializing in treatment for…
By Kelsey Berry The Harvard School of Public Health Department of Global Health and Population (GHP) is hosting what promises to be a fascinating 2-seminar series on Monday Dec 8 and Wednesday Dec 10 entitled: “A Practice of Social Medicine: South Africa and Beyond.” This event should be of interest to those thinking about models for Universal…
By Kelsey Berry Much of the recent Ebola coverage has brought to the forefront principles of disaster triage and served as a reminder of the inescapability of rationing health care resources. A piece in The New Yorker recently highlighted the plight of pregnant women and their apparent exclusion from standard Ebola wards in Sierra Leone. Professor and Ethicist Nir…
By Kelsey Berry The news media has been reporting on the role and means of one’s own death more frequently recently, buoyed along by manifestos (Ezekiel Emanuel’s “Why I Hope to Die at 75”, Brittany Maynard’s “Compassion and Choices” Campaign) that have caught the attention of a diverse audience. These declarations are perhaps more connected to…
By Kelsey Berry In a recent article in Science Translational Medicine, former NIMH Director Steve Hyman explores possible reasons for the policy failure to prioritize treatment of mental disorders worldwide, even when evidence and cost-effective interventions are available and validated. Hyman notes a number of potential factors, loosely falling into four categories. Stigmatization challenges; Fear…
