Chapter 1.D--Moral, Economic, and Political Themes

Chapter 1.D.1--Competing Paradigms

Prof. Bill Sage has written an important article that distinguishes between "relational duties," which are owed to individual patients based on fiduciary duties, and "regulatory duties," which are based on broader public policy.  He argues that health law has a "relational bias," too often treating regulatory duties as if they were relational.  William M. Sage, Relational duties, regulatory duties, and the widening gap between individual health law and collective health policy, 96 Geo. L.J. 497-522 (2008).

Chapter 1.D.2--Ethics, Empirics, and Narrative

On teaching bioethics generally, see Roger B. Dworkin, Bioethics? The Law and Biomedical Advance, 14 Health Matrix 43 (2004). 

The NIH maintains a website for Bioethics Resources on the Web.

An excellent narrative account of what it is like to go through a medical residency in a large-city hospital ran in the New York Times, Nov. 14-17, 1999 (reporter N.R. Kleinfield).  It contains discussions of EMTALA and pharmaceutical company sales tactics, among other topics.

An important article surveying the development and scope of empirical health law scholarship is Michelle M. Mello and Kathryn Zeiler, Empirical health law scholarship: the state of the field,  96 Geo. L.J. 649-702 (2008).

Chapter 1.D.3--Feminist and Critical Race Perspectives

For narrative accounts by doctors who reflect on the impact of racial discrimination, see Vanessa N. Gamble, Subcutaneous Scars, 19(1) Health Aff. 164 (Jan. 2000), and Neil S. Calman,Out of the Shadow, 19(1) Health Aff. 170 (Jan. 2000).

The following are useful government and university web sites relating to civil rights in health care:
Office of Minority Health and Health Disparities
Minority Health Project, University of North Carolina

 For further information and debate regarding racial disparities in health care, see  Symposium, Disentangling Fact from Fiction: The Realities of Unequal Health Care Treatment, 9 DePaul J. Health Care L. 667-884 (2005); Symposium, 27(2) Health Aff. 318 (April 2008); J. Escarce & S. Goodell, Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Access to and Quality of Health Care, RWJF Synthesis Report (Sept. 2007); Jonathan Klick & Sally Satel, The Health Disparities Myth (AIE Press, 2006).

Questioning whether informed consent law is well-suited  to ethnic and regligious minorities, see Dayna Bowen Matthew, Race, Religion, and Informed Consent: Lessons from Social Science, 36 J. L. Med. Ethics 150 (Spring 2008).

Focusing on the case BiDil case of race-specific heart medication, see Symposium, Facts and Fictions: BiDiland the Resurgence of Racial Medicine, 36 J. L. Med. & Ethics 443 (2008); Michael J. Malinowski, Dealing with the realities of race and ethnicity: a bioethics-centered argument in favor of race-based genetics research, 45 Hous. L. Rev. 1415-1473 (2009).

Chapter 1.D.4--Economics

The Federal Trade Commission held an extensive set of hearings in 2003-2004 on Health Care Competition Law and Policy, resulting in a comprehensive report, 
Improving Health Care: A Dose of Competition (July 2004).

See also D.A. Wells, et al., What is Different about the market for Health Care? 298 JAMA 2785 (2007);  Peter J. Hammer, The architecture of health care markets: economic sociology and antitrust law, 7 Hous. J. Health L. & Pol'y 227-264 (2007); Joseph White, Markets and Medical Care: The United States, 1993-2005, 85 Milbank Q. 395 (2007); and Thomas L. Greaney, Economic regulation of physicians: a behavioral economics perspective, 53 St. Louis U. L.J. 1189-1209 (2009);  Michael F. Cannon, Yes, Mr. President A Free Market Can Fix Health Care (Cato Institute 2009)

Chapter 1.D.5--Rationing and Distributive Justice

See Jennifer Prah Ruger, Health and Social Justice (2009).

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