“Last Friday night, my father asked me to kill him.”
Keith Olbermann opened his emotional Special Comment on health care Wednesday with the story of his father’s six-month-long hospitalization suffering through a colon removal, pneumonia, kidney failure, liver failure, and many infections.  

After a particularly difficult week, Olbermann said he went into his father’s hospital room to [...]

[Reason.com] In November, President Barack Obama issued an executive order establishing a new Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. He appointed political scientist and University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann as the chair of the new Bioethics Commission. Such commissions are charged with working through tough questions about intellectual property rights, the protection [...]

[Reuters] Patents on two human genes associated with breast and ovarian cancer should be declared invalid because they stifle the free flow of information and hamper research, lawyers told a New York judge on Tuesday.
A lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups last May posed a broad challenge to gene patenting [...]

[Timesonline] A database of more than 13,000 chemical compounds identified as having the potential to act against the malaria parasite is to be freely distributed to the world’s scientists to encourage a cure.
In a unusual move in the highly-competitive field of global pharmaceuticals, GlaxoSmithKline has decided to publish all data it has on the compounds [...]

[Economist] MORE than a week after the earth convulsed beneath it, Haiti has still to plumb the depths of suffering and want. The numbers are still only more-or-less informed guesses, but their magnitude is grim: perhaps 200,000 killed, 250,000 more injured and some 3m in desperate need of help. The generosity of the world’s response [...]

[medscape] As healthcare reform legislation grinds its way through Congress, 2 articles published online January 6 in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) advocate for one of its touchiest provisions — comparative-effectiveness research (CER).
In theory, CER sounds like a calm, academic subject: evaluate different treatment options for a given illness — drug A vs [...]

The Obama administration has begun approving new lines of human embryonic stem cells that are eligible for federally funded experiments, opening the way for millions of taxpayer dollars to be used to conduct research that was put off-limits by President George W. Bush.
Launching a dramatic expansion of government support for one of the most promising [...]

[healthfreedomalliance] Florida health officials are drawing up guidelines that recommend barring patients with incurable cancer, end-stage multiple sclerosis and other conditions from being admitted to hospitals if the state is overwhelmed by flu cases.
The plan, which would guide Florida hospitals on how to ration scarce medical care during a severe flu outbreak, also calls for [...]

[NYTimes] When Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, appeared in public recently for the first time in months, he revealed that he had received a liver transplant from the victim of a car crash. “I wouldn’t be here without such generosity,” Mr. Jobs said, adding that he hoped that many people would become organ donors.  [...]

[medscape] As US leaders tackle healthcare reform, many conflicting goals and interests vie for supremacy.
Although the overall aim is to lower the nation’s healthcare costs and create access to healthcare for America’s 46 million uninsured, many aspects of the plans could have a huge impact on physicians.
Several healthcare reform plans are being proposed. Major discussions [...]