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Political attacks against women's health care in the United States are threatening access to critical services that allow women to choose and readily obtain the birth control methods that are best for them — threatening their health.

In response to concern about high prices of prescription drugs, presidential candidates and lawmakers have proposed a number of policy changes, including enhancing market forces that put pressure on companies to set lower prescription-drug prices out of self-interest.

Although it's still early in the game, employers are making key decisions about health care coverage that affect patients, providers, and insurers. So far, under the “play-or-pay” model created by the Affordable Care Act, almost all employers have continued to play.

Because oral polio vaccine has been associated with cases of paralysis, it is essential to discontinue its use after polio eradication has been certified. The first step is a shift from a trivalent OPV to a bivalent one, which requires a multipronged global strategy.

Groups advocating quick fixes to the opioid-misuse epidemic seek regulations limiting opioid availability, but prescriber education is a more finely tuned approach, allowing us to individualize care appropriately after a careful benefit–risk assessment.

In 2015, U.S. government agencies began considering greater regulation of both homeopathic drugs and the advertising of such products. These actions came after more than a century of missed opportunities to regulate homeopathic medicines.

The patient's role in medical decision making is often not matched to the clinical circumstances: rather than making strong recommendations when there's greater certainty and allowing patients to decide when there's greater uncertainty, we should do the opposite.

The U.S. House of Representatives argues in a lawsuit that the Obama administration is illegally reimbursing insurers for reducing cost sharing for insurance enrollees under the Affordable Care Act, and a federal district court judge has agreed to consider the case.

In the face of the growing cost of cancer care, the American Society of Clinical Oncology has published a proposed framework for assessing the value of cancer treatments, aiming to help physicians evaluate regimens on the basis of clinical benefit, toxicity, and cost.

Escalating drug prices have spawned a flurry of initiatives designed to help physicians, payers, and patients understand the value of new therapies and make better choices about their use. But these efforts have revealed numerous analytic and implementation challenges.

Many hospitals and clinics have been decimated in the Syrian conflict, and hundreds of medical personnel have been killed, 95% of them by government forces. Yet the international community has failed to enforce the Geneva Conventions.

Increases in numbers of medical students and a cap on Medicare-funded residency positions have sparked fear that some U.S. medical graduates won't be able to practice medicine. But the trends suggest that there will be ample slots for U.S. graduates over the next decade.

In a new trend, increasing numbers of scientific articles are being retracted because of fake peer reviews — a type of fraud made possible by electronic manuscript submission systems and inspired by academia's publish-or-perish ethos.

The proposed changes to the Common Rule for human subjects research, though imperfect, are a significant step forward. They would enhance protections of research participants and improve the efficiency of the review process.

Proposed revisions to the rules governing the ethical conduct of research involving humans aim to enhance respect and safeguards for research participants and to increase research efficiency by reducing unnecessary burdens and calibrating oversight to the level of risk.

Studies proving that the benefits of prompt initiation of antiretroviral therapy for HIV infection outweigh the risks and that preexposure prophylaxis can be implemented safely and effectively will serve as critical tools in the fight to end the HIV–AIDS pandemic.

A century after the Harrison Narcotic Act took effect in the United States, its bias against maintenance therapy continues to hinder medical efforts to ameliorate the effects of our country's latest narcotic-addiction epidemic.

By accelerating adoption of provider-payment reforms in the traditional program and increasing competition under Medicare Advantage, Medicare could achieve better results and move the health care system toward higher quality and sustainable costs.

Recent reports suggest that peer reviews of National Institutes of Health grant applications are at best imprecise predictors of research projects' scientific impact. But these findings may not mean that peer review is failing.

Discordant trends in the incidence of metastatic breast and prostate cancer since the widespread implementation of early-detection efforts may reflect distinct disease dynamics or may result from the different screening strategies used.