We care about health care, and view health as a basic human right. It follows that we would then view health care as a right, too. When we are sick, we want to be able to seek affordable, high-quality, efficient medical care, and we tend to think that everyone should be able to. How far does the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act go in making this a reality for all Americans?

In the quest to discover why we are the way we are, the human genome may be the key. It consists of the complete set of human genetic information—over three billion nucleotides of DNA for 23 chromosomes. If we can understand this vast amount of information, we can then better our understanding of human biology, evolution, inheritance, disease, biotechnology, and medicine. And that is only the beginning.

On August 1, 2012, provisions of the Affordable Care Act increased preventive service access to 47 million women on private insurance by eliminating cost sharing, marking a milestone for women’s healthcare and general independence.

Recent statutes require all public schools to have stock epinephrine programs, and allow school employees to deliver unprescribed epinephrine to children who appear to be having a life-threatening allergic reaction.

Since former President George W. Bush first authorized the National Institutes of Health to fund embryonic stem cell (ESC) research in 2001, research in the field has grown steadily. The number of ESC lines, families of cells derived from the same embryo, has increased from around 60 at the time of Bush’s approval of federal funding to at least 331 today.

Given the CDC estimate that over one-third of the U.S. adult population is obese, the availability of weight-loss drugs has been a controversial topic. According to the Mayo Clinic, weight-loss drugs are generally prescribed for patients with Body Mass … Continue Reading

During their young adulthood in the decades following the Second World War, the “baby boomers” were symbolically viewed as the driving force of optimism and opportunity in our society. As these citizens have grown older, however, there has been growing … Continue Reading

The United States is in the midst of an obesity epidemic. Rising health care costs for diseases related to unhealthy diets have led government policymakers and economists to consider levying a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages. Health care costs for obesity … Continue Reading

With the legalization of same-sex marriage in New York this past June, the gay marriage debate has once again thrust itself into the spotlight. In California, only gay marriages performed before the passage of Proposition 8, which defined marriage as … Continue Reading

The Middle East is popularly conceived as a cluster of closely related, culturally uniform states with similar forms of governance and levels of infrastructure. This picture could not be more different. The region known as the “Middle East” consists of … Continue Reading