We applaud Times columnist Robin Abcarian for shining the light on the inequities in our healthcare system in response to Angelina Jolie’s recent announcement about her prophylactic mastectomy. When Jolie made her medical decision, she had at her disposal the resources to pay for the procedures and the best doctors; not everyone has the same ability.

At the Cancer Legal Resource Center (CLRC), our attorneys hear from individuals who experience great difficulty undergoing the same procedures as Jolie because they fear discrimination based on the results of genetic tests, and because their insurance won’t cover the care they need. Until these barriers are removed, many women of more modest means than an A-list actress will remain unable to take control of their medical decisions. 

Thankfully, women can take several steps to have the BRCA test (which Jolie underwent to determine her genetic predisposition to breast cancer) and other preventive treatments. Abcarian notes the...

In a May 7 Op-Ed article, Richard Greenwald and Michael Hirsch exhort consumers to support the workers who make our clothes rather than the global apparel industry that exploits them with low wages and unsafe working conditions. Yet exactly how we should do this remains unclear. We need to be more specific about our moral responsibility so that the "labels we wear not be stitched in blood."

Should we be faulted for not buying clothes with the "Made in USA" label, for example? Aside from the issue of whether a boycott is effective in improving conditions under global free trade, finding clothes with the label can be difficult. Moreover, even if a garment advertises its American origins, it might still have been produced under abysmal conditions.

Turns out that something as simple as "Made in USA" has loopholes.

First, sweatshops do exist in the United States, especially in large cities such as New York or Los Angeles; they also appear close to the nation’s southern border. These...

The Times' editorial Thursday on the dysfunction at the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department was only half right in concluding that the recent spat between Sheriff Lee Baca and former Undersheriff Paul Tanaka "should serve as a catalyst to speed along the Board of Supervisors in hiring an independent inspector general to oversee the department," as recommended by the Citizen's Commission on Jail Violence. 

What is missing is the recommendation by the Kolts Commission in 1992 that the county should also create a permanent civilian oversight panel to be the eyes and ears of the public. Such oversight would operate in harmony with the new inspector general, similar to the Board of Police Commissioners that oversees the Los Angeles Police Department's inspector general. 

The need for civilian oversight of the Sheriff's Department became apparent in 1992 after a wave of excessive-force incidents and deaths resulted in public outrage and several revelations by The Times and other...

The not-too-subtle subtext of Abcarian's pieces is that Americans harbor hostility toward Muslims that will well to the surface again in the wake of the Boston bombings. After all, as she pointed out, hate crimes against Muslim Americans spiked 1,600% in the months after 9/11 (from 28 in 2000 to 481 in 2001). In her piece on Friday, Abcarian basically hinges her analysis on an isolated anecdote in Ohio that suggests that some Americans are so mean-spirited and vengeful toward Muslims that they took out their "hysteria" on a 10-year-old kid.

It is a dangerous strategy to extrapolate from an anomalous incident to reach grandiose conclusions, especially in an era of...

In their April 12 Op-Ed article "Who should own DNA? All of us," Marcy Darnovsky and Karuna Jaggar write about Myriad's patents on BRCA1 and BRCA2, the so-called breast cancer genes (which were under review Monday at the U.S. Supreme Court), as if they have served little purpose in the development of tests that have helped more than 1 million women to understand their risks of breast cancer and ovarian cancer.

The patents do not cover human genes from anyone's body. As a federal appeals court noted, the patents protect isolated molecules of DNA, which have long been patent eligible, and diagnostic methods of identifying mutations in those sequences. "Isolated" means that researchers defined the molecule and separated it from the complex of genetic material that accompanies it in the body, or synthetically created the molecule in a laboratory. In this case, Myriad took a a strand of DNA (which, if unfurled, would be six feet long) and identified a sequence that could fit on the head of...

In his March 22 blog post criticizing proposals to switch from the consumer price index to "chained CPI" to determine cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security beneficiaries and other items in the federal budget, Michael Hiltzik claimed that there were "no grounds" for the statement made in a recent paper from the Moment of Truth Project ("Measuring Up, The Case for Chained CPI") that the chained CPI provides a more accurate measure of inflation than the measure currently used. 

In fact, experts across the ideological spectrum agree that the chained CPI is indeed more accurate. In his 2005 book "The Plot Against Social Security," Hiltzik listed various proposals for reforming Social Security, among them chained CPI. He wrote, "Many economists maintain that CPI consistently overstates inflation ... because it doesn't account for so-called substitution effects." Hiltzik doesn't explicitly endorse the proposal, but this is certainly a far cry from his objection that there are "no...

In response to Jonah Goldberg's Op-Ed on Tuesday, "The wisdom of Dan Quayle": What? It's been 20 years since the Murphy Brown-Dan Quayle feud, and we're still talking about this?

I suppose I should be flattered. And not surprised. After all, we’re still talking about glass ceilings and Roe vs. Wade and what constitutes "legitimate rape."

But because history, like a hit television series, repeats itself, let's revisit 1992. 

For those of you too young to remember (or too old to recall), Quayle was President George H.W. Bush's vice president. In 1988, he was selected by the Bush camp as running mate because of his youth, his good looks and his conservative values. My show, "Murphy Brown," debuted just as this new administration was settling into the White House. 

It quickly became apparent that Quayle was a comedy writer's dream. He was the Sarah Palin of his time, minus the wit. His nonstop malapropisms were gifts from the comedy gods. For instance, in attempting to quote the...

Though public debate over the future of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station is proper and healthy, it is important that customers understand exactly how their rates are calculated and how utilities' costs are recovered from long-term investments in critical electricity grid infrastructure.  

On its face, Times columnist Michael Hiltzik's argument that utility customers should not have to pay for a power plant that, like San Onofre, is not currently producing electricity seems perfectly logical. But this view incorrectly assumes that Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric, the two principal owners of San Onofre, operate like retail businesses -- as if electrons generated from various sources are sold as individual commodities, like shirts at various retail outlets. But electricity cannot be stored like a shirt on a store shelf.  

In California, the electric utility business is structured very differently than a normal retail or service business. And there is good...

In opposing HR 689, a bill by Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) to federally reclassify marijuana as most other legal prescription drugs and remove oversight from the Drug Enforcement Administration and give it to the states, The Times states in its Feb. 28 editorial that it would be better to regulate cannabis at the federal level than have a patchwork of conflicting state laws.

The Times' reasoning in opposing the bill, co-sponsored by 12 representatives from both sides of the aisle, is shortsighted. In fact, it's virtually impossible to regulate marijuana as other prescription drugs because of the restrictions placed on researching cannabis, the very kind of research that the Food and Drug Administration requires to bring a drug to market.

Since 1970, the Controlled Substances Act has upheld marijuana as one of the most dangerous drugs available, defining it as having a high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use. This stance has been consistently challenged by the medical...

In his Feb. 5 Op-Ed article, "The case for drone strikes," Michael W. Lewis presents a distorted picture of the methodology and conclusions of a report I coauthored, “Living Under Drones: Death, Injury, and Trauma to Civilians from U.S. Drone Practices in Pakistan.”

First, Lewis suggests that our report errs in adopting the civilian casualty estimates provided by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, based in Britain. It is true that the bureau's estimates of civilian casualties have been higher than the two other institutions -- the Long War Journal and the New America Foundation -- compiling the information available on this issue.

But as we explain in our report, we find the bureau's estimates more reliable not because it reports the highest numbers of civilian casualties but because its methodology is more robust than those used by its competitors. Unlike the other data aggregators, the bureau treats source information more transparently, relies on its own researchers...

Former head of the Drug Enforcement Administration Robert Bonner wrote in his Feb. 1 Blowback article, "There is still no such scientific study establishing that marijuana is effective as a medicine."

Nonsense. Over the last several years, the state of California, via the Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research, has conducted several placebo-controlled, FDA-approved clinical trials affirming the safety and therapeutic efficacy of cannabis. Other institutions have as well. (Click here for an overview of more than 200 such trials.)

Summarizing the findings of many of these trials, Dr. Igor Grant of UC San Diego declaredlast year in the Open Neurology Journal: "The classification of marijuana as a Schedule I drug as well as the continuing controversy as to whether or not cannabis is of medical value are obstacles to medical progress in this area. Based on evidence currently available the Schedule I classification is not tenable; it is not accurate that cannabis has no medical value, or...