Introducing the 2014-2015 Petrie-Flom Student Fellows
The Petrie-Flom Center is pleased to welcome our new 2014-2015 Student Fellows. In the coming year, each fellow will pursue independent scholarly projects related to health law policy, biotechnology,...
View ArticleIs “My Patient’s Agent” Always Justified?
Kelsey Berry Is a physician always justified in acting as his or her patient’s agent? This question is familiar to clinical and population-level bioethicists alike, though I hesitate to say that it is...
View ArticleVaccination Policy and Public Trust
By Kelsey Berry The conflict between a physician’s dual roles as an agent of population health and an agent of his or her patient is exemplified in the classical debate about ethical vaccination...
View ArticleDe-Prioritizing Treatment for Mental Illness May be Due to Flaws in Reasoning
By Kelsey Berry In a recent article in Science Translational Medicine, former NIMH Director Steve Hyman explores possible reasons for the policy failure to prioritize treatment of mental disorders...
View ArticleDeath at 29 or 75: Are Manifestos Commitments to Die?
By Kelsey Berry The news media has been reporting on the role and means of one’s own death more frequently recently, buoyed along by manifestos (Ezekiel Emanuel’s “Why I Hope to Die at 75”, Brittany...
View ArticleIs Pregnancy a “Disability” in the Ebola Epidemic?
By Kelsey Berry Much of the recent Ebola coverage has brought to the forefront principles of disaster triage and served as a reminder of the inescapability of rationing health care resources. A piece...
View ArticleDec 8-10: Seminar Series on Social Medicine in South Africa
By Kelsey Berry The Harvard School of Public Health Department of Global Health and Population (GHP) is hosting what promises to be a fascinating 2-seminar series on Monday Dec 8 and Wednesday Dec 10...
View ArticlePregnancy in the Ebola Epidemic – An update
By Kelsey Berry A few weeks ago, I posted on this blog a discussion of an ethical dilemma in the treatment of Ebola-infected pregnant women in West Africa. I wanted to follow-up with two brief updates...
View Article“Volume to Value” Still Needs an Ethics Consult
By Kelsey Berry Whereas “allocation of scarce resources” is a buzz phrase that inspires a great deal of distress and desire for good ethical argument, “waste avoidance” strikes us as a relatively...
View ArticleDiscrimination, by what yardstick?
By Kelsey Berry It’s time to talk about discrimination again — this time, in insurance benefit design. A recent study in NEJM by Jacobs and Sommers has coined the term “adverse tiering” to describe the...
View ArticleDespite Federal Law, Some Insurance Exchange Plans Offer Unequal Coverage for...
By Kelsey Berry One of my previous blogs discussed how potentially discriminatory practices in insurance design may continue to dissuade people with high-cost conditions from enrolling in insurance...
View ArticleEthics for CRISPR and the Big Leap Forward
By Kelsey Berry This week, a research group in China published a paper describing a significant step forward in one application of the genome editing technique CRISPR: they used it to modify the genome...
View ArticleHHS’ Proposed Anti-Discrimination Regulations: Protective But Not Protective...
By Elizabeth Guo Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Civil Rights (OCR) released a proposed rule implementing section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Section...
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