As the Covid-19 pandemic continues to strain health systems’ capacity to provide adequate care for critically ill patients, should patients’ vaccination status be considered in making triage decisions? This question sparked debate recently after the leak of an internal memo of the North Texas Mass Critical Care Guideline Task Force that proposed using patients’ Covid-19 vaccination status as a factor to assign intensive care beds.

In the more than 35 years since federal legislation created organ procurement organizations (OPOs) to recover organs from deceased donors for transplantation, there has been a disparity in their performance, with the best OPOs recovering organs from four times as many donors as the worst OPOs by obj...

The Covid-19 pandemic continues to test and occasionally overwhelm health care institutions. Many practitioners may face the ethically challenging scenario of having to ration ventilators while triaging patients in “crisis care.” Ventilator shortages have led to innovative ventilator design “hacks.” Are these improvised ventilators ethical?

The United States leads the world in coronavirus cases and deaths. Although many people have called out the inadequacies of our health care system, Covid-19 has exposed the most significant shortcomings. The need for change can no longer be ignored. Here are three lessons from this pandemic that should be leveraged for change.

A long-anticipated policy change proposed by the Trump administration that would count the use of many federally-subsidized programs against immigrants currently eligible to use them threatens public health and would undermine ethical practice in health professions and systems.

In an earlier piece, “Trumping Drug Costs,” I looked at out-of-pocket costs as the pivotal issue with drugs. They can be a particularly heavy burden on the elderly, taking money from their savings and a large bite of their Social Security income. Along the way, I also looked at out-of-pocket medi...

I usually have trouble finding a good word to say for President Trump’s policy ventures, but his aim to better control out-of-pocket drug costs is worth support. Distressingly, but unsurprisingly, it does not include giving government the needed power to bargain with industry for what it will pay f...

In “Tackling Obesity and Disease: The Culprit Is Sugar; the Response is Legal Regulation,” published in the Hastings Center Report, Lawrence O. Gostin describes four coordinated interventions that have been effective at controlling peoples’ tobacco consumption and which can serve as a “powerf...

The Uniform Anatomical Gift Act, a landmark law adopted 50 years ago this summer, has provided a sound and stable legal platform on which to base an effective nationwide organ donation and transplantation system, as we discuss in our article in the current issue of the Hastings Center Report. We work...

With Senator John McCain’s heroic return and Vice President Mike Pence’s tie-breaking vote on a health care bill July 25, Senate Republicans managed to cobble together 51 votes simply to agree to debate health care reform. This razor’s edge victory is diagnostic. Hyperpartisan debate is conv...