The Fall 2025 edition of the Duke Medical Ethics Journal explores the economic forces and structures that exist in the medical field. With recent changes to government medical and healthcare funding, this edition aims to inform the Duke community and the general public of the ethical implications of these changes, as well as ethical challenges related to broader economic structures within medical systems. While this issue may explore complex and controversial topics related to economics and politics, we aim not to align with any particular ideology. Rather, our hope is to foster engagement into the intersection of economic structures and forces with the medical field.

Contributors to this issue explore a range of topics, including hospital staffing shortages, changes to Medicaid and Medicare, the monetization of preventative medicine and mental health, evolving research grants, and venture capital’s growing influence on healthcare. Covering a plethora of unique and relevant topics, these pieces reveal many hidden economic systems and pressures, enhancing readers’ knowledge of the multi-faceted nature and complex operations of modern medicine.

The Duke Medical Ethics Journal team thanks you for taking the time to engage with this issue, as well as invites you to explore our past issues to further understand the nature and goals of this Journal. This specific issue aims to critically enhance readers’ understandings of how economic forces change and influence the healthcare industry. Our writers, bloggers, review editors, and graphic designers have worked thoroughly over the past few months to create this issue with the intent of synthesizing this topic into organized and unique pieces. Our hope for this issue is that it will encourage informed conversations regarding recent changes to the healthcare field, as well as how economics as a broader topic affects patients, families, and the expanded medical community.

Thank you for joining us in celebrating Duke Medical Ethics Journal’s newest issue, From Grants to Bills: The Hidden Economy of Medicine.

Sincerely, 

DMEJ Co-Presidents

Devin Mulcrone & Jack Ringel