Health and health care should close the partisan divide, not rip it open further. Politicizing health and health care is not new. Remember Senator John McCain’s famous thumbs down on repealing the ACA? It was a rare act of overcoming the partisan divide. Absent politics, many people agree that the American diet should be healthier,…
Written: August 2024 In Chevron v. NRDC, the Supreme Court created what became known as the Chevron doctrine. The 1984 case required courts to uphold an agency’s reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous law. There was some leeway – courts did not uphold arbitrary or capricious interpretations or interpretations of rules outside the agency’s expertise. They…
Parenthetical in-text citations are a mainstay of many academic journals. They are distracting. But more importantly, they edge authors toward eliminating explanatory footnotes. I suggest it is best to use footnotes for all citations and to describe the main thesis of the article cited, clarify the context, and distinguish the facts or context. Law reviews…
Adapted and including significant excerpts from Zimmerman, A. “Our System for Reporting Child Abuse is Unethical” Hastings Center Forum, September 29, 2023. “Take Care of Maya” documents the tragic circumstances of powerful child abuse pediatrician Sally Smith and social worker Cathi Bedy, who, with doctors and the infrastructure of the Department of Children and Families…
Some articles in mainstream media and academics could be paraphrased as statements that begin “I am concerned about AI proliferation because. . .” Answers can be broadly grouped into two distinct categories: existential threats and grounded, proven and anticipated harms. Math is not going to “take over the world”. While that is an odd statement,…
Medical tourism presents ethical dilemmas and has many downsides. The CDC does recognize that many people from the United States travel to Mexico for care and its website provides some guidance and warnings. Last week, members of a drug cartel kidnapped four travelers to Mexico and killed two of them. Safety along the US-Mexico border…
Hospital and physician liability for saving the life of someone who wished not to be saved is an area of evolving law. While years ago, such cases were routinely dismissed, recent caselaw recognizes the cause of action under medical malpractice. Increasing public awareness of the importance of advance directives and movements like medical aid in…
I envision a broad bioethics, one that covers the relationships and interactions between science and society. Bioethics ranges from dilemmas arising in the relationship between doctors and people seeking care (often clinical ethics) to largescale societal moral dilemmas. The individual and societal issues are intertwined: each has implications for the other. Does a policy, personal…
Organizations and scholars frame the current food crisis as a global phenomenon due to a confluence of events and circumstances like droughts, the pandemic, and the war in Ukraine. As Samantha Power noted this week, “a decade of progress” has been “obliterated”. The number of people with unmet food needs is steeply increasing after a…
Reactions to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health are wide ranging, and many seem to reflect emotion and use charged language. I do not mean to downplay the tossing out of an established constitutional right, but a cooling off period may allow for more reasoned discussion. While in the past courts disagreed about where in the…