Author's posts
Quality of Care in the United Kingdom after Removal of Financial Incentives
Pay-for-performance schemes are increasingly used by health care payers to support improvement in the quality of care and have become widespread in many health systems, including those in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Israel, …
Voluntary Euthanasia — Implications for Organ Donation
In 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada decided to decriminalize medical assistance in dying for patients who are experiencing “grievous and irremediable” suffering. The next year, the Canadian government passed legislation that permits physicians to hast…
“Precision” Public Health — Between Novelty and Hype
In May 2018, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) began enrollment for a vast medical research cohort. Named “All of Us,” it’s meant to include 1 million U.S. volunteers, who will be studied over 10 years at a cost of $1.45 billion. The project prom…
Medicare Spending after 3 Years of the Medicare Shared Savings Program
Since the first accountable care organizations (ACOs) entered the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP) in 2012, it has expanded annually to include 561 ACOs covering approximately one third of the fee-for-service Medicare population. ACOs in the volu…
Personalized Hospital Ratings — Transparency for the Internet Age
Each release of new overall hospital ratings is captivating to journalists, hospital leaders, and health care consumers in the United States. These overall ratings, whether published by U.S. News, Consumer Reports, or Hospital Compare, aggregate a wide…
Ending Use of Oral Poliovirus Vaccine — A Difficult Move in the Polio Endgame
When the world embarked on a mission of global polio eradication with the adoption of a World Health Assembly resolution in 1988, there was only minimal consideration of what would happen after the eradication of wild poliovirus (WPV) had been certifie…
The Supreme Court’s Crisis Pregnancy Center Case — Implications for Health Law
States frequently compel health professionals and commercial entities to disclose information relevant to patient or consumer decision making. For many years, such laws were presumed to be constitutional, despite the First Amendment’s protection of fre…
“Transparency” as Mask? The EPA’s Proposed Rule on Scientific Data
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently proposed excluding from consideration in setting environmental standards any studies whose raw, individual-level data are not publicly available. This proposal was preceded by the wholesale exclusion f…
Free Drug Samples and the Opioid Crisis
To the Editor: Malpractice on the part of some pharmaceutical companies has been established as a key driver of the opioid crisis. Powerful painkillers are offered under attractive conditions to poorly educated patients who are not aware of the risk of…
Outbreaks in a Rapidly Changing Central Africa — Lessons from Ebola
West and Central Africa are experiencing explosive growth in urban populations, economic activities, and connectivity. The recent Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa demonstrated the vulnerability of the local health care infrastructure to newly emergi…
