Maggie Mahar hosts this week’s Health Wonk Review, with a focus on waste in the healthcare system. It’s an excellent edition, full of great articles. Two of my favorites are stories that might not be covered in the mainstream news – but thanks to excellent healthcare bloggers, we still get to read them.
Joe Paduda writes about the flu and Tamiflu and media hype. I love this line: “Now that the most recent fiscal crisis is a distant memory, there’s got to be something to get us riled up – so flu it is.”
Dr. Roy Poses writes about the tragic suicide of Aaron Swartz, a brilliant web developer (RSS feeds and Reddit). Aaron allegedly downloaded thousands of scientific articles from JSTOR, and it was suspected that he was going to make them available online for free (people could already access the articles online, but only if they paid expensive subscription fees). It’s a sad story, and one that has been in the news a lot this week. But Dr. Poses takes a more detailed look at the prosecutor who was fiercely going after Aaron, and finds that she was quite lenient when it came to prosecuting high level healthcare (pharmaceutical and device maker) executives who were accused of crimes that would seem to be much more onerous than Aaron’s.
