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Adding Injustice To Injury - Compulsory Payment For Unwanted Treatment, George J. Annas
Adding Injustice To Injury - Compulsory Payment For Unwanted Treatment, George J. Annas
Faculty Scholarship
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.1 In my view, the judges ruling in Grace Plaza v. Elbaum made a series of errors: they assumed that institutions can have ethics apart from those of their physicians; they believed that both institutions and physicians are primarily motivated by money; and they approved the use of legal threats by institutions and physicians against patients and their families. In this court's idiosyncratic view, dying and medical care seem to be not about …
Risky Business: Setting Public Health Policy For Hiv-Infected Health Care Professionals, George J. Annas
Risky Business: Setting Public Health Policy For Hiv-Infected Health Care Professionals, George J. Annas
Faculty Scholarship
In JULY 1991, THE UNITED STATES SENATE VOTED 81 to 18 to impose a $10,000 fine and a ten-year jail sentence on any HTV-infected physicians who treated patients without disclosing their HIV status. Senator Jesse Helms, the sponsor of the measure, explained his rationale: “Let the punishment fit the crime. . . . I believe in horsewhipping. I feel that strongly about it” (Tolchin 1991). Later, Senator Helms wrote that HIV-infected physicians who practice medicine “should be treated no better than the criminal who guns down a helpless victim on the street” (Helms 1991). In his article he explained that …