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.
Pamela B. Teaster, PhD, MA, MS and Al O. Giwa, LLB, MD, MBA, MBE
Since ageism contributes to global mental health inequity among older people, responding to their needs should be a clinical, ethical, and policy priority.
AMA J Ethics. 2023;25(10):E765-770. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2023.765.
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.
To succeed in accountable care organizations, physicians will need to learn to emphasize collaboration rather than authority, keep costs in mind, and encourage patients to plan in advance for palliative care and death.
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.