{"title":"What Should Be the Nature and Scope of Pediatricians' Duties to Keep Their Patients Insured?","authors":"Sarah D Ronis, Genevieve M Birkby","doi":"10.1001/amajethics.2025.649","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1001/amajethics.2025.649","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Access to health care is a key structural determinant of health, with lack of health insurance as a main barrier. In the United States, nearly half of children rely on Medicaid or the Children's Health Insurance Program for health insurance. Children's eligibility for coverage under these programs is income dependent and can vary over time, so changes in insurance status signal a need to screen for unmet structural needs. Clinicians, who are obligated to respond to what screening reveals, should be prepared to help deploy practice-based, health system, and community resources to help meet the needs of children and families.</p>","PeriodicalId":38034,"journal":{"name":"AMA journal of ethics","volume":"27 9","pages":"E649-656"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144972810","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Why Should Clinicians Care About Infectious Disease Existential Hazards?","authors":"Robert T Ball","doi":"10.1001/amajethics.2025.593","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1001/amajethics.2025.593","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Of all infectious disease events, pandemics could result in significant human depopulation in this Anthropocene epoch or even in the next few centuries. Existential factors that exacerbate pandemic risk include global warming, overpopulation, habitat loss, permafrost thawing, geopolitical conflict, and bioterrorism from naturally occurring or engineered pathogens. This article argues that clinicians have ethical duties to strengthen global public health systems and research on pandemic risk factors, promote proven prevention strategies (especially vaccines), and incentivize domestic and international partnerships that build capacity to respond to existential pandemic harms. Scientific literacy is an intellectual vaccine against the ... charlatans who would exploit ignorance. Neil deGrasse Tyson1.</p>","PeriodicalId":38034,"journal":{"name":"AMA journal of ethics","volume":"27 8","pages":"E593-600"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144761675","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Existential Health Care Ethics.","authors":"Devin M Kellis","doi":"10.1001/amajethics.2025.543","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1001/amajethics.2025.543","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":38034,"journal":{"name":"AMA journal of ethics","volume":"27 8","pages":"E543-548"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144761637","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Self Portraits of a Woman in Peril.","authors":"Kayla Mackenzie McCormick","doi":"10.1001/amajethics.2025.619","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1001/amajethics.2025.619","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This series of self-portraits explores relationships between one's self and possible genetic and epigenetic sources of illnesses.</p>","PeriodicalId":38034,"journal":{"name":"AMA journal of ethics","volume":"27 8","pages":"E619-623"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144761672","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Is There a Right to Protection Against Environmental Existential Threats?","authors":"Amber R Comer","doi":"10.1001/amajethics.2025.582","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1001/amajethics.2025.582","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Despite broad awareness of impending existential threats to humanity, protections from these threats are not yet widely recognized as human rights. This article distinguishes human rights from legal rights, considers possible domestic and international legal approaches to rights-based protection from environmental existential threats, and offers recommendations about how to motivate such protections.</p>","PeriodicalId":38034,"journal":{"name":"AMA journal of ethics","volume":"27 8","pages":"E582-587"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144761640","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ghee Rye Lee, Devin M Kellis, Arthur E Hale, Joseph G Hodgkin
{"title":"Why and How Should Physicians Mitigate Threats of Nuclear War?","authors":"Ghee Rye Lee, Devin M Kellis, Arthur E Hale, Joseph G Hodgkin","doi":"10.1001/amajethics.2025.559","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1001/amajethics.2025.559","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Most physicians do not see, or learn to see, nuclear war threat mitigation as within the scope of their professional duties. This commentary on a case argues there are 2 reasons why physicians, in particular, should draw on their unique training and expertise in medicine to help avert nuclear war: the risk of nuclear war and therefore the risk of catastrophic community, domestic, and global health consequences is presently high; and physicians today can draw on a strong history of past physicians' nuclear disarmament advocacy strategies. This commentary concludes by canvassing how those past strategies can best be applied today.</p>","PeriodicalId":38034,"journal":{"name":"AMA journal of ethics","volume":"27 8","pages":"E559-570"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144761674","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Virtue Ethics and Postponing Human Extinction.","authors":"Charles S Bryan","doi":"10.1001/amajethics.2025.611","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1001/amajethics.2025.611","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Existential ethics (extinction ethics) evokes Van Renssalaer Potter's definition of bioethics as a science of human survival that integrates biological principles, the planetary ecosystem, and wisdom. Explored here is a thesis that virtue ethics (character ethics) should supplement deontological, consequentialist, and other approaches to decision-making relevant to extinction. Advances in philosophy, social science, and neuroscience support the idea that virtues such as faith, hope, and love should complement how virtues such as wisdom, justice, temperance, and courage are expressed when deliberating about existential ethical questions in areas such as global warming, nuclear warfare, and rogue artificial intelligence applications. It has yet to be determined whether Science, as the embodiment of a mechanical force, can rule without invoking ruin…. [T]here must be a very different civilization or there will be no civilization at all. Sir William Osler1A new type of thinking is essential [in the atomic age] if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels. Albert Einstein2.</p>","PeriodicalId":38034,"journal":{"name":"AMA journal of ethics","volume":"27 8","pages":"E611-618"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144761673","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Radiate Youth?","authors":"Lio Barnhardt","doi":"10.1001/amajethics.2025.624","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1001/amajethics.2025.624","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This diptych is a satirical advertisement for a fictional face cream, inspired by and based upon a radium health craze during the early 20th century.</p>","PeriodicalId":38034,"journal":{"name":"AMA journal of ethics","volume":"27 8","pages":"E624-627"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144761642","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Would Conceptualizing Past, Current, and Future Generations as Constituting a \"League of Patients\" Be Useful for Humanity?","authors":"Elizabeth Finneron-Burns, Susan McNair","doi":"10.1001/amajethics.2025.607","DOIUrl":"10.1001/amajethics.2025.607","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Since health is a crucial, if not the most important, feature of persons' well-being, we have good reasons to consider all present and future persons as members of a \"league of patients.\" This article explores what this concept might mean, proposes how it could be applied in the emerging field of existential health care ethics, and draws upon it to better conceive of how to meet the health needs of current and future patients.</p>","PeriodicalId":38034,"journal":{"name":"AMA journal of ethics","volume":"27 8","pages":"E607-610"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144761677","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Four Key Concepts in Existential Health Care Ethics.","authors":"Émile P Torres","doi":"10.1001/amajethics.2025.601","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1001/amajethics.2025.601","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Existential ethics is the study of the ethical and evaluative implications of human extinction. This article examines 4 key concepts in this emerging field: (1) Going Extinct is different from Being Extinct; (2) extinction-causing catastrophes are different in kind, not just degree, from non-extinction-causing catastrophes; (3) \"human extinction\" can have multiple meanings, which, when applied, can yield multiple, even conflicting, conclusions about what might constitute best future outcomes; and (4) there are historical reasons why existential ethics has tended to be ignored until recently. One goal of this article is to launch a discussion about what existential health care ethics could look like.</p>","PeriodicalId":38034,"journal":{"name":"AMA journal of ethics","volume":"27 8","pages":"E601-606"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144761638","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}