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The Ethics of Not Hiring Smokers
Finding employment is becoming increasingly difficult for smokers. Twenty-nine U.S. states have passed legislation prohibiting employers from refusing to hire job candidates because they smoke, but 21 states have no such restrictions. Many health care organizations, such as the Cleveland Clinic and Baylor Health Care System, and some large non–health care…
A Plan To Fix Cancer Care
This year, more than 1.6 million Americans — 0.5 percent of the population — will receive a diagnosis of cancer. Their treatment will consume at least 5 percent of the country’s health care spending, at a cost that is growing faster than all other areas of medicine. Doctors and patients recognize…
Connie Ulrich: Nursing, Moral Distress, & the Duty to Provide CPR
Nurses are essential providers within the healthcare system and often practice or serve in a variety of settings, including assisted living facilities. Therefore, the incident at Glenwood Gardens Assisted Living Facility in Bakersfield, California has called into question the advocacy of an individual who claimed to be a nurse, and who…
'Health Policy & the Affordable Care Act' begins March 25 on Coursera
Coursera
The American health care system has many problems. 50 million people are uninsured. Quality is extremely uneven, with peaks of greatness at leading academic centers but overall poor quality in both process measures and outcomes such as asthma deaths. Finally, the U.S. health care system spends over $8000 per patient…
Health Care's Good News
THINK about it. When was the last time you heard the phrases “good news” and “health care costs” in the same sentence?
I can’t remember either.
Most of the recent talk about health care spending has been pretty bleak. Just take a look at the Rate Review Tool on Healthcare.gov and…
Growing Up Emanuel: Exclusive Excerpt
“Stop, you devils! Stop!” our grandmother shouted at us in Hebrew, but Rahm and I ignored her. We pushed and pulled on my father, Benjamin, who sat firmly on the family-room flioor with his legs crossed and fought back by tickling and kissing us on our necks.
The big challenge of…
We Can Be Healthy and Rich
Just about everyone agrees that health care in America is too expensive, and that something must be done to control the rising costs. Except for one group: hospitals and the unions representing hospital workers.
They believe that controlling health care costs will hurt the economy and increase unemployment. They point out…
Ari, Ezekiel, and Rahm Emanuel's Upbringing
“Think three moves ahead!” and “Remember what Napoleon said: ‘Offense is the best defense,’” Ezekiel Emanuel, the bioethicist brother of Rahm and Ari Emanuel, recalls their father admonishing over family chess games. “These games reinforced our natural tendency to be aggressive in whatever we set out to do.” In a Vanity…
Ezekiel Emanuel on End-of-life Choices
Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, one of the architects of the Affordable Care Act, will join The Daily Circuit Monday, Jan. 14 to share his thoughts on planning end-of-life care for yourself and loved ones.
Dr. Rebecca Sudore, a geriatrician at the University of California, San Francisco, created Prepare, a program…
Penn Medicine Launches Nation's First Program for the Study of Ethical and Policy Issues in Neurodegenerative Diseases
The Perelman School of Medicine and the department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania announce the creation of the Penn Neurodegenerative Disease Ethics and Policy Program. The new program will support research, education and training to identify and address the ethical and policy implications of advances…
Better, if not Cheaper, Care for the Dying
IT is conventional wisdom that end-of-life care is an increasingly huge proportion of health care spending. I’ve often heard it said that people spend more on health care in the year before they die than they do in the entire rest of their lives. If we don’t address these costs, the…
Interview: Zeke Emanuel's plan to fix health-care spending
President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner are getting closer to striking a “fiscal cliff” deal. One of the unresolved areas looks to be health care: Both sides have reportedly agreed to cuts, although without nailing down a crucial detail: Where should those cuts come from?
Zeke Emanuel has a few…
The Tricky Business of Defining Mental Disorders
In the wake of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, the nation is taking a moment to pause and reflect on how it handles mental disorders and disability.
Before we can diagnose and treat mental disorders, we must first answer a more fundamental question, “What should count as…
Wonkbook: Should We Raise the Medicare Age?
A better way to raise the eligibility age for retirement benefits. "If it’s age increases that the political system wants, there’s a better way to do it. Ezekiel Emanuel, who advised the Obama administration on health care and now works with the Center for American Progress, calls it ‘graduated eligibility,’ and…
Employing Behavioral Economics And Decision Science In Crucial Choices At End Of Life
When Scott Halpern was a resident at the University of Pennsylvania, he was struck by the many failures in health care—and by how little the sector had drawn on lessons from other fields to correct them. Many patients “were not receiving known best practices”—such as having the heads of their beds…
The Case for Governing by Lottery
After November's election, after the seemingly endless campaign and billions of dollars in advertisements, Americans are now sending to Washington a new Congress that looks very much like the previous Congress, despite the fact that years of gridlock have earned the chamber some of the lowest approval ratings in American politics.…
The High Cost of Free Office Snacks
TECHNOLOGY companies are famous for providing free food for their employees. Office areas stocked with snacks are great for morale and promote random interactions that often generate new ideas.
The problem is that free food, if it’s the wrong kind, is not really free. It can kill you — or at…
The Moral Wedge in the GOP
Moral issues have defined social conservatism and the core of the Republican Party since Ronald Reagan. Broadly speaking, these issues have to do with relationships between men and women and the beginning and end of life, which in turn are taken as determining our society's collective respect for human life and…
Medicaid cuts would weaken healthcare law
Experts at the Center for American Progress said Medicaid cuts would undermine the success of the president's signature healthcare law.
President Obama needs to walk away from some of the Medicare and Medicaid cuts he endorsed in earlier budget-cutting talks, a group of liberal healthcare experts said Wednesday.
Experts at the…
How Bioethicists Want Doctors to Approach LGBT Patients Differently
Dr. Lance Wahlert is a codirector of The Project on Bioethics, Sexuality, and Gender Identity at the University of Pennsylvania who is leading the way in establishing the burgeoning academic field of Queer Bioethics. He explains some of the issues he's studying and why the medical community needs to start thinking…
