The Five Biggest Lies in the Health Care Debate
Sharon Begley, Newsweek
”Many are simply scared out of their wits about what health-care reform will mean for them. But when fear and loathing hijack the brain, anything becomes believable—even that health-care reform is unconstitutional.”

Dead Wrong: Sarah Palin, meet Hippocrates
Sherwin B. Nuland, The New Republic
“After all, even if there were some provision before Congress that could conceivably be interpreted as establishing a “death panel,” centuries, if not millennia, of established medical ethics (in addition to existing U.S. law) would prevent its actualization.”

How American Health Care Killed My Father
David Goldhill, The Atlantic
“My dad became a statistic—merely one of the roughly 100,000 Americans whose deaths are caused or influenced by infections picked up in hospitals.”

More Than Meets the MRI
Roger Scruton, Times Online
"The philosopher Roger Scruton laments the rise of nonsensical neuroscience."

Details, Schmetails: Think Big on Health Care
Arthur Caplan, MSNBC
"Reform requires appealing to American values, not number crunchers."

Finding What Works in Health Care
William C. Weldon, Washington Post
"We stand at an important crossroads in health-care reform. We must reduce costs, but in a way that does not harm the care of individual patients. A well-designed public-private comparative effectiveness institute, supported with sustainable funding and broad input, is essential for real reform."

Did Steve Jobs' Wallet Help Cut Transplant Wait?
Arthur Caplan, MSNBC.com
"The health care system is a broken mess, but not because a Steve Jobs can get a liver. Rather, it is because all too often only the wealthy and privileged can take full advantage of the best our health care system has to offer."

Court Has the Right to Insist on Chemo
Arthur Caplan, MSNBC.com
"Should families be free to do whatever they want with the children in the name of religious or spiritual belief? The moral answer is no."

Obama Cools the Stem Cell Debate
Jesse Reynolds, San Francisco Chronicle
"The president takes the right approach. There are very good reasons – technical, ethical and political – why cloning-based stem cell research should remain ineligible for federal funds."

Charting a New Course at the FDA
Dr. Marcia Angell, Boston Globe
"It is time to restore the FDA to its purpose, which is to protect the public from unsafe food, drugs, and devices, not to accommodate the industries it regulates."

Embryos and Ethics
Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe
"Like most Americans, I don't believe that microscopic human embryos deserve all the legal protections of personhood. But whether it is right to destroy such embryos for the sake of medical research is not just a question about science; it is also a question of moral and political judgment."

This Is the Way the Culture Wars End
William Saletan, New York Times
"To make a real difference, Obama will have to tell two truths that the left and right don't want to hear: that morality has to be practical, and that practicality requires morals."

Creating a Real Healthcare Market
Regina Herzlinger, Boston Globe
"What do you prefer: giving more power to the state government, which fiddled while Massachusetts healthcare burned, or a transparent consumer-based healthcare system based on real market forces?"

Color ID
William Saletan, Slate
"Is the era of designer babies fianaly here? Now trait selection seems to be coming into view for real."

Select a Baby's Health, Not Eye Color
Allen Goldberg, LA Times
"What I now fear, though, is that clinics offering trait selection to satisfy the whims of parents will turn people against a procedure that can save lives."

Ethics and Octuplets: Society is Responsible
Arthur Caplan, Philadelphia Inquirer
"If the medical profession is unwilling or unable to police its own, then government needs to get involved."

Are Eight Babies More than Enough?
Thomas H. Murray, CNN
"It's time for the profession – and business – of reproductive medicine to accept their firm, inescapable ethical obligation to give the interests and well-being of the children they help to create the same consideration they give to the desires of the adults they serve."

DNA Snoops
Gail Javitt and Kathy Hudson, LA Times
"Although we have come to accept the need for vigilance in document shredding, we have yet to confront the impossibility of DNA shredding and the challenge of protecting our genetic identities from the prying eyes of genetic voyeurs."

Let's Talk about Science
Susan Wolf, Star Tribune
"As public bioethics has moved away from careful and inclusive deliberation and respectful debate to bare-knuckle politics, our capacity for bioethics work has degenerated."

Eugenic Euphemisms
William Saletan, Slate
"I'm happy for the first baby tested 'preconceptionally' for BRCA1 in the UK. We all want to protect our descendants from disease. But let's not protect them from conscience or the truth."