If federal health reforms continue to rely on employer-sponsored health care coverage, ERISA preemption reform should be part of the next steps. State-level reform has acquired greater urgency, while the justifications for preempting that source of reform has eroded. This article recommends a statutory waiver for ERISA preemption as a feasible way to adapt to these circumstances. It offers proposed statutory text for reformers inclined to pursue ERISA reform as health reform.

Based on hierarchical classification and logistic regression of early US and French COVID-19 clinical trials we show that despite the registration of a large number of trials, only a minority had characteristics usually associated with providing robust and relevant evidence.

Drawing on ethical and legal frameworks in the Netherlands, the United States and France, we examine whether physicians are expected to inform patients about potentially relevant opportunities for expanded access to investigational drugs. While we found no definitive legal obligation, we argue that physicians have a moral obligation to discuss opportunities for expanded access with patients who have run out of treatment options to prevent inequality, to promote autonomy, and to achieve beneficence.

This commentary responds to and problematizes Kimmel and Rowe's approach in “A Behavioral Addiction Model of Revenge, Violence, and Gun Abuse.” By advancing an addiction model of retaliatory violence, Kimmel and Rowe medicalize behavior that is better understood as a social problem rooted in structural inequality. Reframing violence in terms of individual pathology abstracts it from social context and risks obscuring the need for structural change. For poor urban communities of color, who are disproportionately impacted by gun violence, medicalizing violent behavior may fuel further marginalization and oppression.

A robust body of research supports the centrality of K-12 education to health and well-being. Critical perspectives, particularly Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Dis/ability Critical Race Studies (DisCrit), can deepen and widen health justice’s exploration of how and why a range of educational inequities drive health disparities. The CRT approaches of counternarrative storytelling, race consciousness, intersectionality, and praxis can help scholars, researchers, policymakers, and advocates understand the disparate negative health impacts of education law and policy on students of color, students with disabilities, and those with intersecting identities. Critical perspectives focus upon and strengthen the necessary exploration of how structural racism, ableism, and other systemic barriers manifest in education and drive health disparities so that these barriers can be removed.

The European Commission’s proposal to address antimicrobial resistance using transferable exclusivity vouchers (TEVs) is fundamentally flawed. European policymakers and regulators should consider alternatives, such as better funding for basic and clinical research, use of advance market commitments funded by a pay-or-play tax, or enacting an EU Fund for Antibiotic Development.

Political debate regarding trans youth’s access to gender-affirming care (GAC) has pushed many to advocate for GAC by pointing to tragic, pathological outcomes of non-treatment, namely suicide. However, these pathologized arguments are a harmful ethical “shortcut” which should be replaced by a meaningful engagement with the ethics of providing GAC to youth.