An undercurrent in all debates about allocation of health care resources to the poor is the matter of access to and coverage of health care for immigrants, particularly low-income and undocumented ones.
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.
Amy Barnhorst, MD, Garen Wintemute, MD, MPH, and Marian E. Betz, MD, MPH
When mandatory reporting of risk of violence is not required, physicians should balance patient autonomy and beneficence with patient and public safety.
AMA J Ethics. 2018;20(1):29-35. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2018.20.1.ecas1-1801.
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.