By Michele Goodwin Anthony Stokes, a fifteen year old kid from Decatur County, Georgia, is expected to die in a matter of months, according to his doctors at the Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. Maybe, they say, he will live for six months. Who knows? Anthony suffers from an enlarged, increasingly less functional heart. His condition…
By Arthur Caplan Art Caplan has a new opinion piece up at nbcnews.com. In “Ethicist: Teens have high failure rates after organ transplants — but cut them some slack,” Caplan responds to a recent study showing that teen organ recipients have much higher failture rates than recipients in other age groups: Remember the long fight over whether Sarah…
By Pablo de Lora In the wake of our seemingly everlasting economic crisis, the Spanish health authorities have decided to exclude single women to access ART treatments – mainly artificial insemination- in the public health care system. “The lack of a male partner is not a medical problem”, has said Ana Mato, our Secretary of…
By Leslie Francis On May 29th, HHS issued the final rule governing wellness incentives in group health plans. While the incentives themselves are not a surprise, the scope they are given is worthy of ongoing attention. Wellness incentives have been controversial because of their potential for intrusion into individual choice, their subtle (or not so…
By Joanna Sax On April 29, Scott Burris blogged about a new bill that would allow Congress to set the scientific agenda, which would replace the traditional peer review process. I echo his expressed concerns, but want to add more. The idea that politicians, and not scientists, could determine the advancement of science is, frankly,…
By I. Glenn Cohen [Cross-Posted at PrawfsBlawg] One of my favorite initiatives at Harvard Law School, where I teach, is that faculty members get to offer an optional 10-12 student not-for-credit “First-Year Reading Groups” on a topic of interest to them that is related to law in some way but not too law-class like. I’ve…
By Pablo de Lora I had recently come across this piece in the NYT. The first thing that came to my mind is the biblical story about the pool of Siloam, a tale that, with all due respect to believers, illustrates the unfair distribution of health, but mostly the unfair distribution of health care (if…
By I. Glenn Cohen I have a new paper on the Supreme Court’s decision on the Affordable Care Act, just published in the European peer-reviewed philosophy journal Ethical Perspectives. It is available for free download here. Here is the abstract: While NFIB v. Sebelius largely upheld the Affordable Care Act (ACA), it did not do…
By The Petrie-Flom Center A reminder that the Harvard University Program in Ethics and Health annual conference, Universal Health Coverage in Low-Income Countries: Ethical Issues, will be held in Boston on April 18-19, 2013. AGENDA https://peh.harvard.edu/events/2013/universal_coverage/agenda.html REGISTRATION No fee. Space limited. Registration required. Please register on our registration website.
By: Katie Booth The looming sequester will have a significant impact on health care, including cuts to Medicare, FDA, CDC, NIH, and Affordable Care Act programs. Budget cuts could slow down the drug approval process, impede the tracking of infectious diseases, and lead to layoffs for hundreds of thousands of workers in the health care…
