Glad to be here

Many thanks to Daniel for his kind introduction.  He's educated me about many important public health concerns via his published work and comments.  I've been a fan of this blog for some time and it's great to be a guest here.   

I regularly blog at Concurring Opinions, often on health law.  I teach courses on administrative law and health care financing and a seminar called Technology, Human Rights, and Equality.  The introduction to that course's syllabus describes some of my main scholarly interests:

We live in an age of constant technological breakthroughs, designed not only to ease human suffering but also to enhance human powers. At first glance, such progress—particularly in the health care field—appears to be an unqualified gain. However, inequality of access to these advances has worried many thoughtful people. To what extent should individuals' access to technology depend on how much money they have--especially when such resources are nonrivalrously consumed?

These concerns are becoming increasingly important as new technologies of medical care and bodily enhancement develop. As we try to understand the moral issues raised by these questions, we will examine how such concerns are translated into laws which set floors and ceilings for access to technology. The moral desirability of such limits on the minimum and maximum amount of technology available (to the poor and rich, respectively) will be the central focus of the course.

One of my key goals in that course is to explore how inequality--and particularly the demands of those at the very top of the income scale--affects the provision of health care generally.  Sometimes the relationship is positive; e.g., drug research originally benefiting an elite ends up serving society as a whole.  But there are also some hidden costs, including diversion of resources and wasteful competition.

I look forward to more posting.

Comments

[Daniel Goldberg]

Hey Frank,

Thanks so much for setting up shop around here!

As you well know, I am particularly interested in inequality as well, and in particular, the strong correlation between population health and the level of inequality in a society.

Technology and techniques (I prefer the latter term for reasons Shai Lavi explains) are certainly a major driving factor in hyperinflationary health care expenditures, and as the recent Dartmouth Atlas study pointed out, may have a relatively weak impact on population health.