Health Care Law and Ethics in a Nutshell
Authors:
Hall, Mark A. / Orentlicher, David
Edition:
5th
Copyright Date:
2025
18 chapters
have results for health
Chapter 8 Selected Issues in Reproductive Medicine 33 results (showing 5 best matches)
- As indicated, three principles tend to drive the cases in this area: (1) pregnant patients, like other persons have a right to refuse unwanted medical treatment, (2) if pregnant patients choose to carry their fetuses to term, they have some obligation to ensure good health for their children, and (3) one person’s health should not be sacrificed for the benefit of another person’s health. In reconciling these principles, courts generally will not impose treatment on pregnant patients unless it provides health benefits for them as well as for their fetuses, and some courts will not impose treatment even when it provides a health benefit to the pregnant patient.
- If the no-trade-off principle precludes mandating treatments that pose risks to the pregnant patient’s health, what if the treatment would benefit parental, as well as fetal, health? One could take the view that it is permissible to impose a duty on parent to child or pregnant patient to fetus when there is no risk to the parent or pregnant patient’s health. Some courts have taken that view, particularly in blood transfusion cases.
- one chooses to continue to term. The law recognizes a duty of parents to promote the health of their children. Since harm to child health can occur before birth, we might extend the duty to promote child health so it applies during pregnancy. Or to put
- Court established its famous “trimester” framework. During the first trimester of pregnancy, the government could not regulate abortion because the state’s interests in fetal life and maternal health, while important, were not yet compelling. By the second trimester, the risks to maternal health from abortion were significant enough to make the state’s interest compelling and therefore a basis for regulating abortion. Once the fetus became “viable” (which at the time of roughly coincided with the end of the second trimester), the state’s interest in potential human life was compelling, and the government could prohibit abortion. Still, even after viability, abortion had to be allowed if continuing the pregnancy would threaten maternal health.
- Another important principle lies in the prohibition against risking one person’s health for the benefit of another. For example, as discussed, even when allowed abortion bans after fetal viability, states were required to permit abortions when necessary to protect the woman’s health. Consider also the example of living kidney donation. Because most people have two functioning kidneys, and a person can do nearly as well with one kidney as with two, living kidney donation is encouraged. Nevertheless, because there are risks to the donor’s health, the law does not require kidney donation.
- Open Chapter
Chapter 1 Health Insurance Coverage and Regulatory Reform 67 results (showing 5 best matches)
- These increases in spending might be celebrated as a great American success story if we believed they produced commensurable benefits. After all, nothing is more treasured than our health; why shouldn’t we spend as much as possible to enhance it? There are three responses to this observation. First, all spending is inherently a trade-off because we can always spend on something else instead. While our health is surely an important priority, it simply is not true that people always treat health as more important than competing values. We see this every day, not only when we smoke, drink, or eat excessively, but also when we drive rather than walk to the store, or we watch T.V. rather than exercise. Second, even if we focus on our health as the overriding value, we must realize that there are other ways to promote health than through medical care. In the words of one prominent health policy analyst, “once a reasonable minimum level of care is provided, factors other than medical care—...
- The vertical scale is the dollar value of health care (either its benefits or its costs). The horizontal scale represents abstract units of health care (days in hospital, doctor visits, drugs, x-rays, etc.). The “Benefits” curve shows the increment in societal health benefits that result from changes in the quantity of health care provided. Thus, at point A, when little health care is being provided, health care is very productive: there is a large return on each additional resource devoted to medical treatment. At some place down the line, though, we reach a point (B) of diminishing returns where additional health care expenditures rapidly become much less productive. As the line crosses the horizontal axis (point C), we reach the area of totally unproductive care, and below the axis is counterproductive treatment that produces a net medical harm (D).
- Medical spending is not the only health care crisis gripping our country. We also continue to face a crisis in health insurance coverage. At the same time that we have devoted massive resources to the health care of most of our populace, we continue to neglect the health care needs of a significant segment of our society. The ranks of the uninsured remain substantial, with over an estimated 60 million adults (almost 25 percent of those under age 65) uninsured at some point during the year. (Fewer than half that number are uninsured at any
- Health policy analysts agree that the central cause of the uncontrolled increase in health care spending is the “complex of irrational economic incentives” inherent in our conventional health insurance system. A. Enthoven at 16. The vast majority of medical treatment is funded by third-party payers—either private insurance policies available primarily through employment or government programs available to the elderly and poor. Traditionally, health insurance has been structured on a piece-work basis known as “fee-for-service,” whereby doctors, hospitals and other providers are paid a separate amount for each discrete item of service. This traditional form of reimbursement creates powerful cost-escalating incentives that affect each actor in the health care system.
- Another useful way to discuss health care rationing is to identify the social and institutional levels at which it occurs. At the most global level, society can decide how much of its total resources to devote to health care versus other social needs, as the British Parliament does when it sets a budget for its National Health Service. At the most microscopic level, we can focus on which patients receive which treatments, as occurs when decisions are made about who has priority for scarce life-saving organ transplants. At the intermediate level, a rationing analysis can help decide which of the many branches of medicine are over or under-funded. This occurs, for instance, in debates over whether health insurance sufficiently covers preventive medicine or behavioral health.
- Open Chapter
A Glossary of Terms and Acronyms 10 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Managed Care: Any system of health service payment or delivery arrangements in which the health plan or provider attempts to control or coordinate health service use to contain health expenditures, improve quality, or both. Arrangements often involve a defined delivery system of providers having some form of contractual relationship with the plan.
- ERISA: Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974—A federal statute that primarily regulates private pension plans, but also encompasses other employee benefits such as health insurance. It has tremendous importance for the regulation of health care delivery because of a sweeping provision that preempts many traditional sources of state law.
- HMO: Health Maintenance Organization—A health care organization that combines insurance and treatment functions in the same entity by providing all needed care for a lump sum annual payment.
- The literature of health care law, and especially health care financing, is filled with acronyms and specialized terminology. We have avoided these where possible, but they are sometimes necessary, for many concepts and agencies are better known by their acronym or specialized phrase than by their full name. To ease the burden on the reader new to the subject, the following list gathers the major acronyms and terms of art used in this book primarily in the first five chapters:
- ACA: Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. “Obamacare”)—A comprehensive reform of the individual health insurance market, a substantial expansion of Medicaid, and a significant body of additional requirements for group insurance.
- Open Chapter
- These are exciting but challenging times in which to study health care law. Traditionally, the primary focus of health care policy was on advancing the state of medical science. Over the past several decades, however, two other concerns have come to dominate the health care policy agenda: the cost of and access to medical treatment. Limiting incessant inflation in health care spending for the bulk of the population covered by insurance and finding ways to afford health care coverage for the medically indigent are issues of paramount importance in the decision-making of law makers, medical practitioners, and health care institutions. These issues were brought to a head in Congress’ 2010 enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Affordable Care Act or ACA). Over its first decade, the ACA survived repeated challenges both in Congress and in the courts, yet pressing issues of medical costs and access remain acute in health care public policy, law, and ethics.
- So that the reader may acquire a deeper understanding of these new legal challenges, Chapter 1 explores the policy and economic environment that shapes the agenda for contemporary health care law and ethics. Chapter 2 then looks at the areas of legal doctrine that directly affect a patient’s right to receive health care, and the structure and content of the doctor-patient relationship.
- THE FUNDAMENTALS OF HEALTH CARE DELIVERY AND FINANCE
- sense in an era when the controlling public policy is to limit or allocate governmental and private health care spending. For example, perhaps malpractice law should take account of the economic costs as well as the medical risks of treatment decisions. Or perhaps antitrust, tax and corporate law should be take more account of health policy concerns in determining how medical institutions are structured and operated. In the field of bioethics, perhaps the law still has not found the right balance among patient autonomy, professional prerogative, and institutional integrity.
- Open Chapter
Preface 3 results
- Scholars debate whether health care law is a coherent intellectual field. Some call it a “chaotic, dysfunctional patchwork” of doctrine, whereas others believe the field coheres around the essential features of medicine and how they systematically shape and change generic law. Despite this unresolved debate, there is a fair degree of consistency about the content of health care law courses taught not only in law schools, but also schools of medicine, public health, and health care administration. Typically, these courses divide into three or four distinct subject areas. Historically, “law and medicine” courses were dominated by the subject of medical malpractice and public health law. These subjects remain important, and are the topic of other books in the Nutshell series. But they no longer are the dominant focus of the field. Modern health care law courses also include two areas that developed rapidly and extensively over the past several decades: the corporate, regulatory, and...
- Part I of this book contains foundational chapters that are relevant to any course in health care law. It capsules the legal and policy issues of health care funding, access, and reform, and it explores the legal structure and content of the doctor-patient relationship. The dramatic growth of health care spending and efforts to contain spending lead to both innovations and tensions in the business of health care. Part II addresses the legal issues that result from these structural and economic forces. Part III moves from these “macro” issues to the ethical dilemmas that arise in individual patient decisions, and covers many of the topics addressed by law school courses in bioethics.
- Most schools teach the financial and structural issues of health care delivery in a separate course from the bioethical puzzles, often through different instructors. Other instructors are more generalists who combine elements of both these areas with the traditional medical malpractice topics into a successful overview course. To maximize our respective talents, we have divided primary authorship responsibilities along these same lines (Hall—Chapters 1–5; Orentlicher—Chapters 6–8). Also, we owe a large intellectual debt to our colleague, Ira Mark Ellman, who had primary responsibility for the bioethics chapters in prior editions. Working together on this book has persuaded us, however, that this multifaceted field of law has many common themes that can and should be integrated into a more coherent whole. To that end this book is a small step.
- Open Chapter
Chapter 5 Complex Transactions and Organizational Forms 35 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Hospitals are not the only health care institutions concerned with tax exempt status. Nonprofit health maintenance organizations (HMOs), outpatient clinics, and pharmacies have also sought to maintain exempt status. When confronted with these nonhospital health care services, federal and state tax policy tends to take a distinctly less welcoming attitude.
- We discuss ERISA preemption at this point because it incorporates the concept of the “business of insurance” discussed above and it limits the extent of state regulation of health insurance to a significant extent. However, it cannot be overly stressed that ERISA preemption permeates the landscape of health care law and public policy. It has major impact in at least three distinct places: (1) malpractice actions against health insurers; (2) contract claims for the denial of payment under health insurance; and (3) state regulation of how health insurance is structured and sold. The focus here is primarily on the third component, but this section also provides an overview that is useful for the other two topics. Moreover, it cannot be overemphasized that ERISA ...up almost anywhere in health law. For instance, each of the following are potentially preempted: physicians’ contract actions against managed care plans that drop them from their networks; taxation of firms that assist self...
- The sharp dichotomy between exemption for hospitals and exemption for other health care services reflects the reality that neither state nor federal taxing authorities actually accept the proposition that health care is a per se charitable purpose, just as they would be unlikely to exempt a nonprofit bookstore despite the per se exemption for “education” that is explicit in the statute. Instead, these authorities are searching for an alternative exemption rationale to differentiate between those health care services that deserve a tax subsidy and those that do not. Although the basis of individual rulings may (or may not) be fairly clear, the
- But wait, there’s more! A third phrase in the statute declares that states may not deem a benefit plan itself to be insurance. As a result, another important policy effect of ERISA preemption is to promote employer self-insurance. The upshot of this “deemer clause” is that employers who self-fund medical benefits rather than purchase insurance for their employees are entirely exempt from state regulation, regardless of the scope of the savings clause. This provides a strong impetus for larger employers to self-insure their health care benefits, in order to reduce state regulation and avoid the cost of premium taxes. For instance, in mandate that self-funded employers provide the same mental health benefits that are required of regulated insurers. Consequently, the number of employees covered by self-insured health care plans grew dramatically in the 1980s.
- The IRS has also grappled with whether nonprofit health insurers and HMOs qualify for exemption. In 1986, Congress withdrew exemption from Blue . How should HMOs then be treated? At first, the IRS took the position that HMOs are merely another form of insurance and therefore not entitled to exemption. However, under pressure from contrary tax court rulings, the IRS adopted a position that seeks to classify which HMOs are more like hospitals, and which are more like insurers. Roughly speaking, the current IRS position is that staff model HMOs are more like hospitals because they directly deliver health care services, and so they can qualify for exemption if they are sufficiently open to the public at large and provide some measure of free services, especially if they own and operate nonprofit hospitals with open emergency rooms. However, IPA or network model HMOs are not exempt, even if they meet these same standards, because they merely “arrange for” health care services. In the...
- Open Chapter
Chapter 4 Antitrust Law and Health Care 18 results (showing 5 best matches)
- This chapter explores four branches of health care antitrust law; group boycott challenges to a hospital’s or HMO’s exclusion of physicians from the medical staff; the price-fixing ramifications of health insurance and provider networks; vertical restraints and monopolization charges against HMOs; and merger doctrine as applied to various health care ventures.
- Each of these contested issues reveals that courts are taking an active role in setting antitrust policy for the health care industry. By doing so, courts for a time were much less deferential to the FTC and DOJ than they typically are in antitrust matters. During the 1990s and 2000s, there were repeated expressions of judicial annoyance at treating health care just like any other industry, and insistence that the enforcement agencies recognize the unique attributes of health insurance and medical care rather than rely on general economic theories. More recently, however, courts have come to recognize the competitive harms that may be resulting from consolidation in the health care industry.
- The federal antitrust laws have prompted one of the most burgeoning areas of health care litigation in modern times. Prior to 1980, antitrust challenges to the health care industry were almost unheard of. It was thought that the antitrust laws did not apply to the learned professions and that health care is an inherently local activity not subject to federal jurisdiction. The Supreme Court exploded both of these myths in the mid-1970s. In
- firms at the same level within the marketplace) concerning the price or quality of their products, usually, an agreement not to undercut each others’ price. The per se illegality of price fixing presents a danger in the establishment of various innovative forms of health insurance. The clearest example comes from preferred provider organizations (PPOs), but this analysis applies to other types of provider networks that enter into managed care arrangements. PPOs are groups of health care providers that agree to sell their services at a discount in exchange for receiving a large supply of business, say, all the employees covered by a large group insurance policy. PPOs are sometimes initiated by insurance companies or employers, who contact health care providers individually and negotiate discounts one by one. Such “consumer-based” PPOs raise no price fixing concern because the consumer group establishes a separate bilateral contract with each provider. More typically, though, PPOs...
- More conventional insurance practices have also been subject to antitrust attack. Most cases concern insurers either limiting the amount that physicians can bill or excluding certain categories of health care providers. In one leading case, Blue Shield was sued unsuccessfully for imposing a ban on “balance billing,” that is, prohibiting participating physicians from charging patients any more than the contractual amount paid by the insurance policy. was sued successfully for limiting coverage of mental health services from clinical psychologists that were fully covered when rendered by psychiatrists.
- Open Chapter
Chapter 2 The Treatment Relationship 35 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Any treatment of health care law faces the daunting task of deciding which topics to present and in what order. Health care law, as it has developed over the past half century, has become an unwieldy collection of disparate areas of doctrine and public policy. Accordingly, some lawyers and scholars maintain there is no unifying structure or core set of ideas that qualifies this as a coherent and integrated body of legal thought and professional practice, other than the happenstance that each topic involves doctors, hospitals, or health insurance in some way. We agree this field has not yet jelled in the way that classic first-year subjects have, but we nevertheless see interlaced throughout these disparate topics several organizing principles or themes that potentially explain not only what makes these disparate parts cohere, but also why that coherence distinguishes health care law from other bodies of law.
- One of these of organizing themes, and perhaps the most prominent, is the set of attributes that make the medical enterprise uniquely important or difficult in the legal domain. Health care law is about the delivery of an extremely important, very expensive, and highly specialized professional service. If anything distinguishes health care law, it must be the unique aspects of the treatment encounter viewed from both sides of the doctor-patient relationship. Health care law in each of its branches must take account of the phenomenology of what it is
- Two closely related laws, both of which apply to a wide range of activities beyond health care, are of rapidly growing importance in this field: Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 ( ). HIV/AIDS first drew attention to the application of disability law to health care and HIV cases continue to arise and receive coverage, but the application of disability discrimination law to health care is considerably broader.
- The patchwork nature of these various protective laws, and the increasing proliferation and computerization of medical information, prompted the federalization of privacy law. A statute known as HIPAA, for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which mainly deals with insurance regulation, required the Secretary of Health and Human Services to issue a massive medical privacy regulation, in order to make it safer to store authority to store and transmit medical information electronically (ostensibly a cost-savings , governs all individually identifiable “personal health information” maintained by “covered entities,” which include insurers and institutional providers, rather than just physicians. These entities must (1) adopt internal procedures to protect the privacy of protected health information; (2) keep records showing they have notified patients of their privacy policies; and (3) train employees regarding privacy procedures.
- If the required screening reveals an “emergency medical condition,” the hospital must undertake treatment. EMTALA’s definition of “emergency” is a condition reasonably likely, without “immediate” treatment, to create “serious jeopardy” to the person’s health. This definition is at least as inclusive as many of those found in state common law and state statutes, and the range of conditions it covers is thus reasonably broad.
- Open Chapter
Chapter 3 Hospital Structure and Regulation 27 results (showing 5 best matches)
- A more specialized regulatory regime that exists in most states requires hospitals and other health care institutions to obtain a certificate of need (“CON”) from a government agency before constructing new facilities, purchasing major medical equipment, or instituting new health services. CON laws arose from the National Health Care Planning and Development Act of 1974, which required states to adopt CON regulation in order to receive certain federal health care funding. In 1987, though, Congress became disenchanted with the CON regulatory approach (for reasons explained below) and repealed the federal mandate, leaving states free to depart from the federal model. Consequently, a number of states have scrapped their CON laws entirely and a number of others have substantially loosened their regulatory reigns. Still, CON has a significant presence in the majority of states and is expected to remain as a permanent fixture in the health care regulatory apparatus for some time to come.
- CON laws are designed to curb these excesses by requiring hospitals and other health care facilities (such as nursing homes, ambulatory surgery clinics, and home health agencies) to demonstrate a need for new projects that involve a substantial expenditure. The exact expenditure thresholds and project descriptions vary widely from state to state, but generally speaking the amounts involved must be $1 million or higher.
- The prototypical health care institution is the general, acute care, medical-surgical hospital. Hospitals come in many shapes and sizes. Most are private and non-profit, although many are run by government entities or owned by investors. Some are quite small, with 50 beds or less; others are 1000-bed behemoths. Community hospitals offer more basic services such as routine childbirth and simple operations while major medical centers and teaching hospitals strive to have the most comprehensive and state-of-the-art programs and technology available. Other hospitals specialize in only a limited range of medicine, such as mental health or cancer. Nevertheless, hospitals of all types share important common features. There are also common features among all medical institutions. Although we seldom mention nursing homes, home health agencies, diagnostic clinics, and ambulatory surgery facilities in this book, often times when we refer to hospitals we could equally well include these other...
- This chapter explores the basic legal environment in which traditional hospitals and other health care facilities are organized and operated. It addresses the bodies of law that are most familiar to health care lawyers, and for the most part it regards these facilities in their simplest structure. Although this chapter considers the obvious extensions of this basic legal doctrine to HMOs and other more complex ventures, most of the cutting-edge legal developments that respond to these innovative structures are taken up in the subsequent chapters.
- This fundamental division between hospital and doctor pervades the health care delivery system. A hospital patient (or her insurance company) will receive a bill for physician services that is separate from the bill for hospital services. The core of Medicare is split into two parts, Part A for hospital (and other institutional) costs and Part B for physician charges. Blue Cross/Blue Shield plans, which are the largest component of the health insurance industry, reflect the same dichotomy.
- Open Chapter
Table of Cases 14 results (showing 5 best matches)
Chapter 7 End-of-Life Medical Decisions 41 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Tex. Health & Safety Code Ann. § 166.046
- Finally, third-party interests can limit a right to refuse treatment, but not in the typical end-of-life case. Third-party interests arise primarily in the context of public health or pregnancy. As to the former, courts permit a number of treatments to be imposed when a patient’s illness threatens the health of others, as with mandatory immunizations or antibiotics for communicable diseases. The classic case here is sustain their lives or health and the lives or health of their fetuses. These cases will be discussed in Chapter 8. There also are cases involving prisoners in which the court has ordered treatment because of concerns about the disruption of institutional order.
- Recall that when patients do not leave a living will to express their wishes about the use of a ventilator, feeding tube, or other treatment, courts will consider oral statements by patients to see whether there is clear and convincing evidence of the patients’ treatment preferences. If health care providers should carry out patient wishes for a treatment decision when patients have expressed their preferences through clear oral statements rather than through a formal written document, they also should consider oral statements by patients regarding their choice of surrogate. For example, it was quite clear that Michael Martin expected his wife to make medical decisions for him. This question has not been addressed by courts, so it is typically assumed that surrogates need to be authorized by a written appointment or a surrogate decision-making statute. The Uniform Health-Care Decisions Act (2023) requires a writing for a power of attorney (§ 8) but allows oral designations of...
- As we saw in Chapter 2, patients possess the basic right of informed consent: Physicians and other health professionals may not provide care to a patient without first informing the patient about the care and its alternatives and obtaining the patient’s voluntary and competent consent to the treatment. If the patient must consent to treatment, it follows that the patient also has a right to withhold consent and refuse the treatment.
- Despite years of ethicists and courts rejecting the distinction between withholding and withdrawing, health care providers may feel very differently about the two acts. Some physicians believe it is less acceptable to withdraw care than to withhold it. These feelings are not surprising. It is hard not to feel responsible for a patient’s death when you turn off a ventilator and the patient dies within minutes. Accordingly, while patients have a right to refuse treatment, health care providers generally can decline to participate in the withdrawal of care and arrange for other providers who are comfortable with the withdrawal to carry out the patient’s wishes.
- Open Chapter
- The National Organ Transplant Act of 1984 created the Organ Procurement and Transportation Network (OPTN), a private nonprofit entity, to oversee retrieval of organs and determine standards for their allocation. The United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) operates OPTN under contract with the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). UNOS is a membership organization that includes the country’s 58 organ procurement organizations (OPOs), transplant centers, and others. In 2023, the Health Resources & Services Administration (HRSA) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) launched a modernization of the OPTN that may include reliance on multiple organizations rather than only UNOS to operate the organ allocation system.
- Laws and public policies that seek to procure more transplantable organs must balance the interests of donors, recipients, and the public health. In doing so, policymakers confront a number of important and recurring dilemmas, including the definition of death, the proper role of consent, potential obligations to donate organs, and the role of financial incentives in motivating donations.
- (discussed in Chapter 8.C.1). It is not permissible to risk one person’s health even to save another person’s life. For an interesting argument defending the ethics of a law that would both compel everyone to be potential donors of renewable and non-essential tissues, and assure universal
- the likelihood of a successful transplant, including the expected length of the benefit (which in turn may depend, in part, on the recipient’s age and general health status);
- response that the current system inhibits needed expansion in the supply of organs, and that it is unjust to donors since recipients, physicians, and others all derive concrete benefits from the donors’ largesse, yet donors remain uncompensated in material terms. Some proposals would provide payment to family members of people who agree while alive to organ donation after their deaths, to avoid the concern of people putting their health at risk for money.
- Open Chapter
- The pressures of the cost, coverage and reform described in Chapter 1 are pushing the health care industry to develop organizational forms and relationships that do not fit easily into preexisting legal categories. As a consequence, health care corporate and regulatory law remains a flourishing practice area that requires sophistication in subjects as diverse as antitrust, tax, licensure, and insurance regulation. The materials in the second part of this book examine these and other private and public law doctrine that have the greatest relevance to the unique legal problems presented by the structure and functioning of the contemporary health care delivery system.
- HEALTH CARE DELIVERY
- Open Chapter
Outline 11 results (showing 5 best matches)
Index 19 results (showing 5 best matches)
- A clear grasp of the definition of death is also important to understanding issues that arise in the termination of life-sustaining treatment, which is taken up in Chapter 7. In some cases, a doctor or hospital might resist a request to discontinue treatment necessary to prolong life; in other cases, health care providers might feel that further treatment would be futile and should be withheld when patients or their families request the care. Chapter 7 also considers the question whether patients may hasten the dying process by taking a lethal dose of medication (“medical aid in dying”).
- of treatment necessary for fetal health, or regulating conduct during pregnancy that might harm a fetus.
- Open Chapter
- Publication Date: February 14th, 2025
- ISBN: 9798887868073
- Subject: Health Law
- Series: Nutshells
- Type: Overviews
- Description: Public policy responses to escalating medical costs and constrained access pose fundamental challenges to health care law. Profound medical advances also generate many ethical dilemmas. This authoritative discussion considers how law and ethics respond to these driving social, economic, and political forces of innovation, crisis and reform. Topics include health insurance reform, health care finance and delivery structures, treatment relationships, facility and insurance regulation, corporate and tax law, refusal of life support, organ donation, and reproductive technologies.
