By Erin Fuse Brown[Cross-posted from Center for Law, Health and Society Blog] Last month, Slate columnist Reihan Salam wrote a provocative article about outrageous hospital prices that are driven, according to Salam, by greed, avarice, and market power. Salam gets a few things dead right, namely his diagnosis that we have a massive hospital pricing problem…
By Arthur Caplan A new piece by contributor Art Caplan on NBC News: Biogen, a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech company, announced last week that early tests of their new drug aducanumab, a monoclonal antibody, had shown impressive results in treating those with early stage Alzheimer’s disease. The drug significantly reduced the amyloid plaque buildup in the…
Book Launch: Identified versus Statistical Lives: An Interdisciplinary Approach March 11, 2015 12:00 PM Wasserstein Hall, Room 2012 Harvard Law School, 1585 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA Identified versus Statistical Lives: An Interdisciplinary Approach is an edited volume that grew out of the 2012 conference “Identified versus Statistical Lives: Ethics and Public Policy,” cosponsored by the…
This new post by George Annas appears on the Health Affairs Blog, as part of part of a series stemming from the Third Annual Health Law Year in P/Review event held at Harvard Law School on Friday, January 30, 2015. 2014 saw an epidemic of Ebola in Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia, and an epidemic of fear in the US. Neither epidemic…
By Ross D. Silverman In the midst of the national discussion of measles and the state laws that foster or inhibit its spread, a curious fact has emerged, as noted recently by my JAMA co-author Tony Yang: Mississippi, dead last in the nation’s overall health rankings in 2012, 2013, and 2014, leads the nation in…
By Nicole Hassoun Ebola is ravaging parts of Africa, yet it is not the worst health problem facing people in the region. Millions more are infected with and die every year from diseases like malaria, TB, and HIV/AIDS because they cannot access the essential medicines they need. To change this, we need to understand where…
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 David Orentlicher[Cross-posted at Health Law Profs.] With Harvard professors protesting their increased responsibility for health care costs, we are seeing just the most visible aspect of the recurring cycle described in “Tragic Choices.” As Guido Calabresi and Philip Bobbitt observed in that book, society tries to defuse societal conflict by hiding its rationing choices through implicit forms…
By Arthur Caplan Art Caplan has a new piece on hyperbaric oxygen therapy over at NBC News: Hyperbaric oxygen therapy. Have you ever heard of it? The Internet sure has. Centers and clinics tout the benefits of sitting in a tank breathing 100 percent oxygen at higher than atmospheric pressure for treating autism, infant brain…
By David Orentlicher[Cross-posted at Health Law Profs blog] A number of studies have suggested that education, wealth, and other socioeconomic factors are more important than health care in promoting a person’s health. Earlier this week, NPR reported on a study of welfare payments that reinforces the link between income and health. Researchers studied children whose…
