HeyJaredLet's Get Ethical
What happens when right and wrong aren't black and white? Welcome to Let's Get Ethical, where hosts Michael Sheahan and Robert Fishwick explore complex ethical dilemmas in healthcare—moments where answers aren't in textbooks and clinicians disagree.
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 6
- Latest publication
- Sep 22, 2026
- Audience
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 14, 2026
Latest episodes
She Signed the Contract. Then She Said No. Surrogacy, Autonomy & When Consent Can Be Revoked (opens the original)
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A nurse agrees to be a gestational surrogate. The contract includes a clause: if doctors find a serious fetal anomaly, the intended parents can request termination — and she signs it, with a psychologist involved, fully informed. Then, 20 weeks in, a serious diagnosis comes. The parents invoke the clause. And she says no. Is that a broken promise, or is it exactly what bodily autonomy is supposed to look like? Mike and Rob dig into one of the thorniest cases they've covered — a real, ongoing sur
The WISER Model: When Denying Medicare Claims Pays. Prior Authorization, AI & the Ethics of "No" (opens the original)
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Who gets to decide whether you receive the care your doctorordered — and what happens when the person deciding is rewarded for saying no? Mike and Rob dig into WISER, a new Medicare model (theWasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction model) that pairs AI and machine learning with human reviewers to evaluate whether certain services get approved. Prior authorization isn't new, and reducing genuine waste is a good thing — but this episode is about what happens when financial incentives, algorit
The Suction Machine Was Right There: A Preventable Death & the Ethics of Duty to Rescue (opens the original)
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A suction machine sat at the bedside, switched off. Over an eight-hour shift, aides asked more than ten times for the patient to be suctioned. He mouthed that he couldn't breathe. And by morning, an 87-year-old Korean War veteran named Pete was dead — from something as simple, and as preventable, as a machine that was never turned on. In this episode, Mike and Rob work through one of the hardest cases they've covered: a real preventable death in an Iowa long-term care facility. It's not just a s
Modern Medical Ethics Is Only 40 Years Old — Here's Where It Actually Came From (opens the original)
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Where does ethics actually come from? Mike and Rob trace the entire arc of medical ethics — from the Code of Hammurabi in 1754 BCE and the Greek philosophers, through Hippocrates and "do no harm," all the way to the four pillars that govern clinical practice today. Here's the part that surprises everyone: the framework modern healthcare runs on — autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice — is barely 40 years old, formalized by Beauchamp and Childress in 1979. Rob walks through the hard
4,000 Nurses Walked Out — Was It Ethical? Inside the Brigham Strike, the Lockout & the $8.4M CEO (opens the original)
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Is it ever ethical for healthcare workers to walk off the job? When roughly 4,000 nurses at Brigham and Women's Hospital — part of the Mass General Brigham system — staged the largest nursing strike in Massachusetts history, it forced a hard question: where's the line between workers' rights and a clinician's duty to the patients in the beds? Rob and Mike work through every side of it — the one-day walkout, the multi-day lockout that followed, the contracted "registry" nurses brought in to cover
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