Physicians, Thou Shalt Ration: The Necessary Role of Bedside Rationing in Controlling Healthcare Costs

Physicians, thou shalt ration: the necessary role of bedside rationing in controlling healthcare costs.

Physicians are often asked to be "gatekeepers," determining their patients' access to medical therapies and technologies. At the same time, most physicians have been taught that they should act as patient advocates, pursuing patients' best interests regardless of cost. This paper reviews moral arguments ethicists have made for and against "bedside rationing." It argues that healthcare rationing...

Thou shalt not kill.

Section 241(b) and s. 14 of the Criminal Code unjustifiably infringe s. 7 of the Charter and are of no force or effect to the extent that they prohibit physicianassisted death for a competent adult person who (1) clearly consents to the termination of life and (2) has a grievous and irremediable medical condition (including an illness, disease or disability) that causes enduring suffering that ...

Bedside rationing by physicians: the case against.

Society should not accept the inevitability of rationing medical resources, at least not in the short term. Because of the high degree of waste and duplication that characterize the Canadian and, even more, the American healthcare system, the invitation to focus on rationing procedures known to be useful is likely to divert attention from the need to eliminate waste. If and when extensive ratio...

Thou Shalt ASQFor and Shalt Receive the Semantic Answer

The combination of data, semantics, and the Web has led to an ever growing and increasingly complex body of semantic data. Accessing such structured data requires learning formal query languages, such as SPARQL, which poses significant difficulties for non-expert users. Many existing interfaces for querying Ontologies are based on approaches that rely on predefined templates and require expensi...

Doctor, thou shalt not kill.