The right to die: state courts lead where legislatures fear to tread

The right to die may be among the most legally complex and culturally sensitive areas of civil rights to emerge in our time. The thorny issues associated with a terminally ill individual's right to self-determination, and the disposition of individuals who are incompetent to make right to die decisions for themselves, promises to keep all parties involved - health care professionals, medical ethicists, families, lawyers, judges, and state legislators -busy for some time to come. To this point, the state courts have taken the lead in the right to die debate, while the state legislatures have tended to drag their collective feet. This article lays the case law groundwork for right to die decision making, then goes on to assay the legislative responses to the issue that have been rendered in the fifty states.     

Medicaid and access to child health care in Chicago.

In this article we examine how increasing the reimbursement of physicians and expanding Medicaid eligibility affect access to care for children in Cook County, Illinois, which overlies Chicago. Using Medicaid claims and other data at the zip-code level, we compare the places where Medicaid children live with the places where all the physicians who treat children and those who accept Medicaid patients have their practices. Our findings suggest that the recent changes in legislation are unlikely to benefit extremely poor children, who are more likely to live in depressed inner-city areas, where there are few physicians. "Near-poor" children whose homes are dispersed throughout the county, who are now eligible for Medicaid as a result of the recent changes, are likely to see improvements in their access to care. Further changes in policy, aimed at enhancing the capacity of institutions providing care, could improve access for the children of the inner city.