Chile’s health-care sector was opened up to the forces of the market by a new law in 1981 that allowed private insurance companies, called Isapres, (Instituciones de Salud Previsional) to compete for business. Prior to that, all Chileans were obliged to pay 4% of their income into the state-run Fondo Nacional de Salud (FONASA). The new law gave people, who could pay more, a greater choice and a...

The Implicit Association Test (JAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998) provides a flexible measure of the automatic associations underlying implicit prejudice. Results of three experiments showed strong evidence of implicit prejudices based on religious ethnicity (Jewish vs. Christian), age (young vs. old), and nationality (American vs. Soviet). Subjects responded more rapidly to tasks that o...

Using data from three countries (US, Italy and Australia) and surveying related studies from several other countries in Europe, we investigate the effects of the New Basel Capital Accord on bank capital requirements for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). We find that, for all the countries, banks will have significant benefits, in terms of lower capital requirements, when considering sm...

I am deeply indebted to the radiologists of the Royal Victoria Hospital, and in particular to Doctor D. C. Porter, for a great deal of help and advice, as well as for the X-ray examinations. I am obliged to the visiting medical staff of the Belfast City Hospital who have kindly allowed me to use their notes and X-rays in some cases. I owe the haematological examinations to Doctor M. G. Nelson a...

“We are ethically obliged and incited to think beyond what treated as the realistic limits of possible” [...]

I T IS VERY DIFFICULT to prove that an industrial or nonindustrial cxposure to a chemical has an etiologic relationship to the development of aplastic anemia, especially when there are very few reported instances of such a relationship. Such a situation has presented itself and we, therefore, feel obliged to report this association : the development of aplastic anemia after prolonged exposure t...

BACKGROUND The detection of wild poliovirus in Israeli sewage in May 2013 led the health authorities to vaccinate children with OPV (Oral Polio Vaccine). Shelly Kamin-Friedman explored the legal and ethical dimensions of this policy. This commentary makes three claims: (1) Mandatory vaccination is a valid exercise of the state's police powers to protect the common good. (2) A disease eradicatio...