“THE PSYCHOLOGICAL TOLL SHOULD NOT BE UNDERESTIMATED.”
As the rationing debate unfolds, Newsweek asked doctors, lawyers, ethicists and other health care experts to wrestle with the fraught questions involved. Their essays follow:
THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC HAS rapidly and radically disrupted any sense of normality in all aspects of medical practice in the United States. Rationing life-saving care is not something American doctors are accustomed to consciously considering in our daily working lives, let alone ever communicating it to patients or their families. At most, we are taught a little about it, typically in school, as a part of a formal course in medical ethics.
At Harvard Medical School, where I have taught
