Bioethics and the Law, Fourth Edition

New to the Fourth Edition:

• New questions and debates among health care professionals, lawyers, and bioethicists
• Separate sections are devoted to issues related to individuals and those related primarily to communities
• Each of the subject areas has been updated and many have been expanded, including:
• questions raised about the Affordable Care Act since 2016, material on novel techniques for human “enhancement,” and responses to new public health challenges, such as opioid misuse and the Ebola virus

Professors and students will benefit from:

• multidisciplinary approach combines legal discussion with jurisprudential, philosophical, and sociological materials
• strong expressions of different points of view
• shows the need to mediate the discontinuity between the law's focus on broad rules and the bioethicist's concern with context and detail
• explicitly requires students to consider ethical implications:
  • health care as a business
  • shifting parameters of the provider/patient relationship in healthcare
  • the role of government in designing and implementing healthcare programs such as Medicaid and Medicare
• supplements traditional focus on the ethical interest of the individual with a second focus on the socio-economic developments that shape healthcare
• connects broad public healthcare issues to concerns of patient/healthcare consumer
• promotes understanding of unsettling, complex situations
• underscores bioethical developments for understandings of personhood
• includes clinical, research, public health, and organizational ethics materials and their legal counterparts