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Biomedical subjects

C H Baron

Publications and source records attributed to C H Baron.

11 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1983

Licensure of health care professionals: the consumer's case for abolition.

While state medical licensure laws ostensibly are intended to promote worthwhile goals, such as the maintenance of high standards in health care delivery, this Article argues that these laws in practice are detrimental to consumers. The Article takes the position that licensure contributes to high medical care costs and stifles competition, innovation and consumer autonomy. It concludes that delicensure would expand the range of health services available to consumers and reduce patient dependency, and that these developments would tend to make medical practice more satisfying to consumers and providers of health care services.

Consumer Behavior↗
PubMed1979

Medical paternalism and the rule of law: a reply to Dr. Relman.

In this Article, Professor Baron challenges the position taken recently by Dr. Arnold Relman in this journal that the 1977 Saikewicz decision of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts was incorrect in calling for routine judicial resolution of decisions whether to provide life-prolonging treatment to terminally ill incompetent patients. First, Professor Baron argues that Dr. Relman's position that doctors should make such decisions is based upon an outmoded, paternalistic view of the doctor-patient relationship. Second, he points out the importance of guaranteeing to such decisions the special qualities of process which characterize decision making by courts and which are not present when such decisions are made by doctors. Finally, he argues that Dr. Relman has overestimated the social costs of bringing Saikewicz-type cases before the courts and that those costs which are inevitable are more than offset by the qualities of process that the court system can offer in such matters.

Decision Making↗
PubMed1978

Assuring "detached but passionate investigation and decision": the role of guardians ad litem in Saikewicz-type cases.

The author focuses this Article upon the aspect of the Saikewicz decision which determines that the kind of "proxy consent" question involved in that case requires for its decision "the process of detached but passionate investigation and decision that forms the ideal on which the judicial branch of government was created." This aspect of the decision has drawn much criticism from the medical community on the ground that it embroils what doctors believe to be a medical question in the adversarial processes of the court system. The author criticizes the decision from an entirely opposite perspective, arguing that the court's opinion fails in not laying down guidelines that would assure a truly adversary process in Saikewicz-type cases. He agrees with the Saikewicz court that our democratic institutional structure and societal commitment to individual liberty require that persons not competent to consent for themselves to acts of euthanasia be protected by a process of "detached but passionate investigation and decision." However, he points out that this ideal of the court system was not realized in Saikewicz itself and is not likely to be realized in other cases without reform of some of the procedures currently being employed by the courts in "proxy consent" cases. Drawing on previous articles that he has written in related areas, he then proposes a set of guidelines that he believes not only will remove existing procedural deficiencies, but also may reform some aspects of the existing system that have drawn criticism from the medical community.

Aged↗