Why health care reform must tackle the escalating cost of medical technology Technological innovation is deeply woven into the fabric of American culture, and is no less a basic feature of American health care. Medical technology saves lives and relieves suffering, and is enormously popular with the public, profitable for doctors, and a source of great wealth for industry. Yet its costs are rising at a dangerously unsustainable rate. The control of technology costs poses a terrible ethical and policy dilemma. How can we deny people what they may need to live and flourish? Yet is it not also harmful to let rising costs strangle our health care system, eventually harming everyone? In Taming the Beloved Beast, esteemed medical ethicist Daniel Callahan confronts this dilemma head-on. He argues that we can't escape it by organizational changes alone. Nothing less than a fundamental transformation of our thinking about health care is needed to achieve lasting and economically sustainable reform. The technology bubble, he contends, is beginning to burst. Callahan weighs the ethical arguments for and against limiting the use of medical technologies, and he argues that reining in health care costs requires us to change entrenched values about progress and technological innovation. Taming the Beloved Beast shows that the cost crisis is as great as that of the uninsured. Only a government-regulated universal health care system can offer the hope of managing technology and making it affordable for all.

“Eloisa James’s writing is absolutely exquisite.” —New York Times bestselling author Teresa Medeiros “Nothing gets me to a bookstore faster than a new novel by Eloisa James.” —New York Times bestselling author Julia Quinn A wonderful spin on a much-beloved fairy tale, Eloisa James’s When Beauty Tamed the Beast is heart-soaring and fun historical romance at its finest. No wonder People magazine raves about her books, saying, “Romance writing does not get much better than this.” Eloisa’s delightful take on Beauty and the Beast unfolds in Regency England, where a beastly, bad-tempered Earl matches wits with a brazen beauty who has vowed to make the handsome grump fall in love with her in two short weeks.

After years of turmoil, Roderick Cherbon has left the Crusades to return to the home he loves. But the wars have changed him, and the heir who thought to heal his father's injustices has become a vicious beast of a man, scarred inside and out. He will speak to no one, see no one; he leaves the shadows of his ruined keep only under the darkness of night. And even in death his father mocks him: to retain his land and title, Roderick, the Beast, must marry. Lady Michaela Fortune is reviled for her poverty, ridiculed for her dreams, and preyed on for her soft heart. Humiliation and want dog her beloved family, and her pride is an indulgence she can ill afford. Cherbon and its shattered lord offer a solution. But to court a man who has fallen so low, Michaela will need all her grace and beauty to harbor any hopes of taming the beast. . . Romantic Times.

Summoned like a serving girl to the king, Laura Cambridge was hired as nanny to Richard Blackthorne’s secret child. Rumors about this hulking recluse didn’t daunt Laura—her beauty-queen past had taught her the inner person didn’t always match the facade. But Richard’s heart was as painfully scarred as his chiseled features.... To Richard, lovely Laura was like candy dangled in front of a baby—he was offered the sweet, but denied the taste. Yet sometimes grizzly bears enjoyed a taste of honey...and in fiction the disfigured Mr. Rochester won the love of Jane Eyre. So Richard dared to woo his green-eyed goddess, gambling that—like Jane—Laura would one day declare, “Reader, I married him.”

One of the founding fathers of bioethics describes the development of the field and his thinking on some of the crucial issues of our time. Daniel Callahan helped invent the field of bioethics more than forty years ago when he decided to use his training in philosophy to grapple with ethical problems in biology and medicine. Disenchanted with academic philosophy because of its analytical bent and distance from the concerns of real life, Callahan found the ethical issues raised by the rapid medical advances of the 1960s—which included the birth control pill, heart transplants, and new capacities to keep very sick people alive—to be philosophical questions with immediate real-world relevance. In this memoir, Callahan describes his part in the founding of bioethics and traces his thinking on critical issues including embryonic stem cell research, market-driven health care, and medical rationing. He identifies the major challenges facing bioethics today and ruminates on its future. Callahan writes about founding the Hastings Center—the first bioethics research institution—with the author and psychiatrist Willard Gaylin in 1969, and recounts the challenges of running a think tank while keeping up a prolific flow of influential books and articles. Editor of the famous liberal Catholic magazine Commonweal in the 1960s, Callahan describes his now-secular approach to issues of illness and mortality. He questions the idea of endless medical “progress” and interventionist end-of-life care that seems to blur the boundary between living and dying. It is the role of bioethics, he argues, to be a loyal dissenter in the onward march of medical progress. The most important challenge for bioethics now is to help rethink the very goals of medicine.

"Has all the lush world-building and intoxicating magic of the Harry Potter universe" — Entertainment Weekly "Lush and sweeping swords-and-sorcery romance" — The New York Times Assassin's Creed meets Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them in this gripping, epic fantasy romance trilogy. My heart wasn't part of the deal when I bargained for my life, But assassins so rarely keep their word. Exiled Charmer Leena Edenfrell is running out of time. Empty pockets forced her to sell her beloved magical beasts—an offense punishable by death—and now there's a price on her head. With the realm's most talented murderer-for-hire nipping at her heels, Leena makes Noc an offer he can't refuse: powerful mythical creatures in exchange for her life. Plagued by a curse that kills everyone he loves, Noc agrees to Leena's terms in hopes of finding a cure. Never mind that the dark magic binding the assassin's oath will eventually force him to choose between Leena's continued survival...and his own. The Beast Charmer Series: Kingdom of Exiles The Frozen Prince (coming early 2020) The Shattered Crown (coming late 2020)

Daniel Callahan's life time work in bioethics has again and again returned to the root problems of health, progress, technology, and death. How we think about each of them individually and in relation to each other will shape the way we approach and deal with the most common dilemmas of modern medicine. They are at the roots of the field.

Fan favorite couple Rhage and Mary return in this gripping novel in the #1 New York Times bestselling Black Dagger Brotherhood series. Nothing is as it used to be for the Black Dagger Brotherhood. The slayers of the Lessening Society are stronger than ever, preying on human weakness to acquire more money, more weapons, more power. But as the Brotherhood readies for an all-out attack on them, one of their own fights a battle within himself... For Rhage—the Brother with the biggest appetites, but also the biggest heart—life was supposed to be perfect. Or at the very least, perfectly enjoyable. But he can’t understand or control the panic and insecurity that plague him. Terrified, he must reassess his priorities after suffering a mortal injury. And the answer, when it comes to him, rocks his—and his beloved Mary’s—world...

The essays in this book, written by researchers from both humanities and science, describe various theoretical and experimental approaches to adding medical ethics to a machine, what design features are necessary in order to achieve this, philosophical and practical questions concerning justice, rights, decision-making and responsibility in medical contexts, and accurately modeling essential physician-machine-patient relationships. In medical settings, machines are in close proximity with human beings: with patients who are in vulnerable states of health, who have disabilities of various kinds, with the very young or very old and with medical professionals. Machines in these contexts are undertaking important medical tasks that require emotional sensitivity, knowledge of medical codes, human dignity and privacy. As machine technology advances, ethical concerns become more urgent: should medical machines be programmed to follow a code of medical ethics? What theory or theories should constrain medical machine conduct? What design features are required? Should machines share responsibility with humans for the ethical consequences of medical actions? How ought clinical relationships involving machines to be modeled? Is a capacity for empathy and emotion detection necessary? What about consciousness? This collection is the first book that addresses these 21st-century concerns.

This book analyzes policy fights about what counts as good evidence of safety and effectiveness when it comes to new health care technologies in the United States and what political decisions mean for patients and doctors. Medical technologies often promise to extend and improve quality of life but come with many questions: Are they safe and effective? Are they worth the cost? When should they be allowed on the market, and when should Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurance companies be required to pay for drugs, devices, and diagnostic tests? Using case studies of disputes about the value of mammography screening; genetic testing for disease risk; brain imaging technologies to detect biomarkers associated with Alzheimer's disease; cell-based therapies; and new, expensive drugs, Maschke and Gusmano illustrate how scientific disagreements about what counts as good evidence of safety and effectiveness are often swept up in partisan fights over health care reform and battles among insurance and health care companies, physicians, and patient advocates. Debating Modern Medical Technologies: The Politics of Safety, Effectiveness, and Patient Access reveals stakeholders' differing values and interests regarding patient choice, physician autonomy, risk assessment, government intervention in medicine and technology assessment, and scientific innovation as a driver of national and global economies. It will help readers to understand the nature and complexity of past and current policy disagreements and their effects on patients.