Appellate courts in California and New Jersey have reached conflicting conclusions in the first legal tests of whether artificial feeding is a "medical treatment," and whether it is ever legally permissible to allow a ...

With the Nancy Cruzan decision, the post-Reagan Supreme Court continued recreating America's legal landscape by transferring traditional rights from its citizens to state legislatures and state officials....Our challenge ...

Annas argues that current public policy that emphasizes cost containment over quality of care and equity of access is an effort to transform medical care from a social good to an economic good. This trend threatens to ...

Annas fears that efforts to control health care costs will erode the traditional ethic that hospitals have an obligation to provide emergency care to anyone, regardless of ability to pay. He characterizes emergency ...

Three commentaries are offered on the following case: George, age 57, is a previously healthy man who recently underwent surgery for removal of a low-grade malignant thymoma. At the time of admission to the hospital, ...

Annas discusses three 1987 New Jersey Supreme Court cases in which the court decided that life-sustaining treatment could be terminated either because this was what the patient clearly wanted (

A New York court this year issued one of the most disturbing and aberrant appellate opinions of the past two decades concerning the right to refuse treatment. In my view, the judges ruling in