HEALTH POLICY & BIOETHICS

This course introduces students to how healthcare policy is created and implemented in the United States and abroad, while also raising critical ethical issues surrounding healthcare policy for the US, and other industrialized as well as poorer nations. Through lectures, discussions, and readings from the current literature, we will explore the political processes and concerns which produce our current policy; examine the major issues being debated surrounding the creation and delivery of healthcare, including ethical issues; explore the process by which we induce biomedical progress and development; explore barriers to sound healthcare production and delivery in various countries, and examine the recent reforms wrought through the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). In addition, we will spend a few units looking, in detail, at the unusual challenges posed in delivering healthcare to the poor and the elderly.