With the U.S. Supreme Court likely to decide on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, it is instructive to understand the relevant policy positions of the largest physician organization in the country.
The picture that emerges from study of physician economic behavior is mixed, but from the intensity of responses by some professional societies to Medicare's coding modifier proposal, it appears that economic incentives matter a lot to many of their members.
Physician-journalists balance the ethical requirements of two professions with competing goals. Physicians must “do patients no harm ” and “keep secret” what they “see or hear”; journalists seek out and disseminate information in service of public enlightenment.
This process of developing EBM-based guidelines and applying them to clinical care highlights the tension between generating unbiased knowledge based on statistical aggregation and the application of this information to individual patients.
The NRMP’s new “all-in” policy requires every residency program to fill every first-year position either exclusively through the match or outside of it. Programs that continue to offer prematches will operate outside the match.
Roy Ahn, MPH, ScD, Kristina Tester, Zaid Altawil, MD, and Thomas F. Burke, MD
To promote good practices, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working in global health should adopt and follow rules of professional conduct that put communities’ wants and needs over those of the NGOs.
AMA J Ethics. 2015;17(5):456-460. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2015.17.5.pfor2-1505.
If the American Society for Reproductive Medicine's recommendations for egg-donor compensation limits have been successful, they violate antitrust law. If they are ineffective, egg donors are not being sufficiently protected against coercion and commodification.