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…
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, …
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…
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…
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…
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 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…
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…
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…
Adolescents’ use of electronic cigarettes initially took the public health community by surprise. In 2011, less than 2% of U.S. high school students reported having used e-cigarettes in the previous month. But by 2015, the percentage had jumped to 16%….
