Bioethics in the News — Thursday, February 16, 2006
February 16, 2006
HSA
A survey to be released today reveals that CEOs view increasing healthcare costs as an impediment to expanding their workforces. Many employers are asking employees to shoulder more of the cost, and a majority is experimenting with initiatives like healthcare spending accounts, or using discounts to reward a healthy lifestyle.”
Meanwhile, President Bush yesterday delivered a speech reemphasizing his State of The Union call for an expansion of Health Savings Accounts (HSAs). The speech was delivered at the headquarters of Wendy’s, a company that offers HSAs to its employees.
Finally, The Wall Street Journal has (on their free OpinoinJournal site) an op-ed commenting on Maine’s attempt to ensure that all its citizens are covered by health insurance The writers, who work in healthcare policy, point out the high cost of the program and suggest that “a better alternative for uninsured individuals in Maine is Health Savings Accounts.” Access to healthcare is a huge issue, and clearly, HSAs are picking up a lot of momentum.
Cloning: Intuitions and Science
Dartmouth Neuroscientist and President’s Council on Bioethics member Michael Gazzaniga has an op-ed in The New York Times arguing that “all clones are not the same.” Gazzaniga takes the distinction between reproductive cloning and biomedical cloning and appeals to intuitions about what constitutes a human person: “Look at your loved ones. Do you see a hunk of cells or do you see something else?”
In making this appeal to intuition, this scientist ignores the information that science provides about the embryo. According to Human Embryology & Teratology (3rd edition), “it is now accepted that the word embryo, as currently used in human embryology, means ‘an unborn human in the first 8 weeks’ from fertilization.”
In short, all clones are the same. Biomedical cloning and reproductive cloning both yield human embryos (unborn humans).
