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.
Cultural failure to recognize tacit knowledge explains why credential-based knowledge has higher status and prioritizes clinicians who do not care on an hour-to-hour basis for most of our country’s elders.
AMA J Ethics. 2022;24(9):E883-889. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2022.883.
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.
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.