Drug prices and corporate greed: there may be limits to our gullibility

“A Huge Overnight Increase in a Drug’s Price Raises Protests”, by Andrew Pollack in the New York Times September 20, 2015, features the story of Daraprim, the brand name for pyrimethamine, a drug used to treat toxoplasmosis. “Toxo”, often associated with cat feces, is a protozoan and was an fairly rare infection prior to the HIV epidemic, when it became a significant cause...

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Battling for Biomedical Supremacy? How about improving the people's health?

In an editorial on August 30, 2015, the New York Times discusses the “Battle for Biomedical Supremacy”, looking at the practice of what they call “poaching” of biomedical researchers by one state or university from another. Their main focus on the receiving end is Texas, because it has the highest profile of spending really big money to recruit researchers from universities in other states, and its main concern is (unsurprisingly) New York, which...

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Does prevention save money? Is that the right question?

Does prevention save money? That is, does increasing access to preventive health care, doing more screening tests on a larger number of people, end up saving more money in the long term by reducing the cost of caring for the diseases that are prevented? This is the question asked in “Conventional wisdom clashes with data on health care savings”, by Margot Sanger-Katz in the New York Times on August 7, 2015. Ultimately, she answers “no”; indeed, in...

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