Should old folks who have lived their lives be allowed to place a huge economic burden on the young by using a disproportionate amount of limited Medicare resources for medical care?
Jing Li, PhD, Robert Tyler Braun, PhD, Sophia Kakarala, and Holly G. Prigerson, PhD
For dying patients and their loved ones to make informed decisions, physicians must share adequate information about prognoses, prospective benefits and harms of specific interventions, and costs.
AMA J Ethics. 2022;24(11):E1040-1048. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2022.1040.
Dr Steven Starks joins Ethics Talk to discuss the shortage of geriatric psychiatrists and how cross-specialty training can prepare clinicians of all specialties to care for geriatric patients.
Dr Rajesh R. Tampi joins Ethics Talk to discuss his article, coauthored with Drs Aarti Gupta and Iqbal Ahmed: “Why Does the US Overly Rely on International Medical Graduates in Its Geriatric Psychiatric Workforce?”
Caregiver trustworthiness and a competent patient’s prerogative to return to suboptimal living conditions are critical considerations in discharge planning.
AMA J Ethics. 2015;17(6):506-510. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2015.17.6.ecas2-1506.
The current Medicare operation—reimbursing medical goods and services to a growing number of people without basing the reimbursement benefit on the actual cost of the services—is unsustainable, but there are some possible remedies.
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.
By studying both basic economic theory and the social and philosophical values that underpin medical decision making, medical students will be prepared to make better resource allocation decisions.
Though conservative management can be perceived as withholding care, sometimes it is in the patient's, not just the hospital's or clinic's, best interest.