Int J Health Serv
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Current conditions surrounding the house of medicine-including corporate and government cost-containment strategies, increasing market-penetration schemes in health care, along with clinical scrutiny and the administrative control imposed under privatization by managed care firms, insurance companies, and governments-have spurred an upsurge in physician unionization, which requires a revisiting of the issue of physician strikes. Strikes by physicians have been relatively rare events in medical history. When they have occurred, they have aroused intense debate over their ethical justification among professionals and the public alike, notwithstanding what caused the strikes. ⋯ As a result, these physicians will have to come to terms with the use of the strike weapon. On the surface, many health care strikes may not ever seem justifiable, but in certain defined situations a strike would be not only permissible but an ethical imperative. With an exacerbation of labor strife in the health sector in many nations, it is crucial to explore the question of what constitutes an ethical physician strike.
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Protecting children from the sharpest edges of poverty during their years of growth and formation is both the mark of a civilized society and a means of addressing some of the evident problems that affect the quality of life in the economically developed nations. The proportion of children living in poverty has risen in a majority of the world's developed economies over the past decade. This report asks what is driving poverty rates upwards and why some OECD countries are doing a much better job than others in protecting children at risk.
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Protecting children from the sharpest edges of poverty during their years of growth and formation is both the mark of a civilized society and a means of addressing some of the evident problems that affect the quality of life in the economically developed nations. The proportion of children living in poverty has risen in a majority of the world's developed economies over the past decade. This report asks what is driving poverty rates upwards and why some OECD countries are doing a much better job than others in protecting children at risk.
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The setting up of the National Rural Health Mission is yet another political move by the present government of India to make yet another promise to the long-suffering rural populations to improve their health status. As has happened so often in the past, it is based on questionable premises. It adopts a simplistic approach to a highly complex problem. ⋯ They also ignore some of the basic postulates of public health practice in a country such as India. That they did not substantiate the bases of some of their contentions with scientific data from health systems research reveals that they are not serious about their promise to rural populations. This is yet another instance of what Romesh Thaper called "Baba Log playing government government."
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The pharmaceutical industry routinely exaggerates its expenditures on research and development, but it does spend billions annually. But not all R&D is equally important. ⋯ Innovators are rewarded with a marketing monopoly, and this drives what kind of research they do and what practices they follow to profit from their products. It is a system that creates incentives for marketing more than for research, which inevitably drives the marketing mission to corrupt the R&D process.