Closed formularies can be justified when they enable spending on other socially valuable aims, but they can single out poor patients.

Low-resource areas are heterogeneous and changing, so establishing an evidence base for decision making about technology use is an important priority.

Exploitation can be exacerbated when health professions students’ educational goals are overemphasized relative to patients’ and communities’ needs.

Regularly scheduled dialysis is not standard of care for most undocumented immigrants in the United States, so preventative care, and advocacy for it, is needed.

Whether a patient’s decisional regret constitutes a failure of shared decision making can depend on how a decision was made.

Shared decision making honors patient autonomy, particularly for preference-sensitive care decisions and even when patients have impaired decision-making capacity.

Shared decision making in research informed consent conversations is complex due to diverse and potentially divergent interests of investigators and patient-subjects.

Drs Katrina Bramstedt and Ana Iltis discuss the development of QoL assessment tools to help patient-subjects considering reconstructive transplantation.

Inequity makes it imperative to consider how trade and patent policies influence international patients’ access to treatment and prevention.

Redirecting focus from treatment to prevention is a global public health imperative.