The Canadian Supreme Court has determined that the ban imposed by Quebec on the use of private medical insurance violated the province's Charter of Rights.
Health savings accounts should not be the focus of a strategy to expand health care coverage to the uninsured, but should be considered complementary to more fundamental health care reform.
An attorney argues that for the uninsured and underinsured, the limitations that exist with health saving accounts far outweigh the benefits and could be a threat to the existence of comprehensive health care coverage.
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.
Patients seeking IVF are highly motivated to become parents and may wish to preserve financial resources for surrogacy or adoption should IVF not succeed, so risk sharing appeals to them, which makes its high cost especially problematic.
Measuring outcomes alone is not the answer. There should be a way to reward the doctor for educating a patient about lifestyle modifications and then documenting that the care provided followed patient preferences.
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.
How can clinicians respond to the alarmingly high rates of maternal mortality in the U.S., and address racial disparities between black and white mothers? This month on Ethics Talk, we discuss how clinicians can improve maternal outcomes.
Medical education must acknowledge the problematic use of race as a biological or epidemiological risk factor in research and the controversy over race.
AMA J Ethics. 2017;19(6):518-527. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2017.19.6.peer1-1706.