Drawing on ethical and legal frameworks in the Netherlands, the United States and France, we examine whether physicians are expected to inform patients about potentially relevant opportunities for expanded access to investigational drugs. While we found no definitive legal obligation, we argue that physicians have a moral obligation to discuss opportunities for expanded access with patients who have run out of treatment options to prevent inequality, to promote autonomy, and to achieve beneficence.

The European Commission’s proposal to address antimicrobial resistance using transferable exclusivity vouchers (TEVs) is fundamentally flawed. European policymakers and regulators should consider alternatives, such as better funding for basic and clinical research, use of advance market commitments funded by a pay-or-play tax, or enacting an EU Fund for Antibiotic Development.

Improving the health and life of individuals living in poverty requires new models and new approaches, moving healthcare away from today's medical mindset of acute care toward a conception of healthcare as value-based, which necessarily means connecting disparate impacts with the healthcare services that are delivered.

This article examines the unique disadvantages experienced by Black people and other people of color with substance use disorder in health care, and argues that an intersectional approach to enforcing disability rights laws offer an opportunity to ameliorate some of the harms of oppression to this population.

A robust body of research supports the centrality of K-12 education to health and well-being. Critical perspectives, particularly Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Dis/ability Critical Race Studies (DisCrit), can deepen and widen health justice’s exploration of how and why a range of educational inequities drive health disparities. The CRT approaches of counternarrative storytelling, race consciousness, intersectionality, and praxis can help scholars, researchers, policymakers, and advocates understand the disparate negative health impacts of education law and policy on students of color, students with disabilities, and those with intersecting identities. Critical perspectives focus upon and strengthen the necessary exploration of how structural racism, ableism, and other systemic barriers manifest in education and drive health disparities so that these barriers can be removed.

Here, we analyze the public health implications of recent legal developments — including privacy legislation, intergovernmental data exchange, and artificial intelligence governance — with a view toward the future of public health informatics and the potential of diverse data to inform public health actions and drive population health outcomes.

The federal system for allocating donated livers in the United States is often criticized for allowing geographic disparities in access to livers. Critics argue that such disparities are unfair on the grounds that where one lives is morally arbitrary and so should not influence one's access to donated livers. They argue instead that livers should be allocated in accordance with the equal opportunity principle, according to which US residents who are equally sick should have the same opportunity to receive a liver, regardless of where they live. In this paper, we examine a central premise of the argument for the equal opportunity principle, namely, that geographic location is a morally arbitrary basis for allocating livers. We raise some serious doubts regarding the truth of this premise, arguing that under certain conditions, factors closely associated with geographic location are relevant to the allocation of livers, and so that candidates' geographic location is sometimes a morally non-arbitrary basis for allocating livers. Geographic location is morally non-arbitrary, we suggest, since by taking it into account, the UNOS may better fulfill its central goals of facilitating the effective and efficient placement of organs for transplantation and increasing organ donation.

Colorado has consistently had one of the highest rates of suicide in the United States, and El Paso County has the highest number of suicide and firearm-related suicide deaths within the state. Community-based solutions like those of the Suicide Prevention Collaborative of El Paso County may be more effective in preventing suicide as they are specific to local issues, sensitive to local culture, and informed by local data, community members, and stakeholders.

This commentary responds to and problematizes Kimmel and Rowe's approach in “A Behavioral Addiction Model of Revenge, Violence, and Gun Abuse.” By advancing an addiction model of retaliatory violence, Kimmel and Rowe medicalize behavior that is better understood as a social problem rooted in structural inequality. Reframing violence in terms of individual pathology abstracts it from social context and risks obscuring the need for structural change. For poor urban communities of color, who are disproportionately impacted by gun violence, medicalizing violent behavior may fuel further marginalization and oppression.

If federal health reforms continue to rely on employer-sponsored health care coverage, ERISA preemption reform should be part of the next steps. State-level reform has acquired greater urgency, while the justifications for preempting that source of reform has eroded. This article recommends a statutory waiver for ERISA preemption as a feasible way to adapt to these circumstances. It offers proposed statutory text for reformers inclined to pursue ERISA reform as health reform.