BACKGROUND National guidelines recommend use of high-intensity statins after hospitalization for coronary heart disease (CHD) events. OBJECTIVES This study sought to estimate the proportion of Medicare beneficiaries filling prescriptions for high-intensity statins after hospital discharge for a CHD event and to analyze whether statin intensity before hospitalization is associated with statin ...

Disenrollment rates from Medicare managed care plans have been reported to the public as an indicator of health plan quality. Previous studies have shown that voluntary disenrollment rates differ among vulnerable subgroups, and that these rates can reflect patient care experiences. We hypothesized that disabled beneficiaries may be affected differently than other beneficiaries by competitive ma...

Joseph Mendola’s ambitious goal in this philosophically rich book is to provide a comprehensive account of goodness and justice which coheres with our intuitions and which is also thoroughly justified by independent metaphysical arguments. The project has three distinct parts. The first part develops a new form of act-consequentialism, which focuses on group agents and their acts, called Multip...

Many people seem to share some version of what has been called the "intuition of neutrality" about creating new people, which, roughly, says that there exists a certain range of levels of well-being such that creating people within this range is, in itself, morally neutral, but creating people with a level of well-being outside this range is not morally neutral. In this paper, I will discuss di...

This paper aims at clarifying some conceptual flaws blurring the equity-efficiency debates involved in the setting of objectives of GHGs emissions control beyond 2012. To this end, it carries out numerical experiments that test the viability of agreements grounded on two contrasting target allocation rules: a “Soft Landing” rule prolonging a Kyoto-type agreement; and a “Convergence” rule progre...

One of the currently popular dogmata of anticonsequentialism is that consequentialism does not respect, recognize, or in some important way account for what is referred to as the “separateness of persons.” William Shaw, a widely read philosopher at San José State University, refers to this charge as a “virtual mantra.” 1 The charge is often made, but rarely explained in any detail, much less ar...

Slippery slope arguments (SSAs) of the form if A, then C describe an initial proposal (A) and a predicted, undesirable consequence of this proposal (C) (e.g., "If cannabis is ever legalized, then eventually cocaine will be legalized, too"). Despite SSAs being a common rhetorical device, there has been surprisingly little empirical research into their subjective evaluation and perception. Here, ...