I trace the evolution of ethical approaches to health policy in the United States and examine a number of critical unresolved issues pertaining to the current set of frameworks. Several themes emerge. First, fair procedures claim more attention than substantive and procedural principles. Second,...

Responding to Eugene Volokh, Medical Self-Defense, Prohibited Experimental Therapies, and Payment for Organs, 120 Harv. L. Rev. 1813 (2007) Professor Volokh argues for a constitutional right to medical self-defense for two purposes: first, to allow terminally ill patients to purchase, at their...

Objective: To study cross-national inequalities in mortality of adults and of children aged 5 years using a novel approach, with clustering techniques to stratify countries into mortality groups (better-off, worse-off, mid-level) and to examine risk factors associated with inequality. Design,...

Background: A world divided by health inequalities poses ethical challenges for global health. International and national responses to health disparities must be rooted in ethical values about health and its distribution; this is because ethical claims have the power to motivate, delineate...

Global health scholarship has failed to adequately consider the “BRIC” cluster of nations - Brazil, Russia, India and China - particularly in the aggregate. An article search with the keywords “BRIC” and “public health” yields just one publication. But these countries have a unique...