Elizabeth Warren

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Aaron Swartz And How A Martyr Makes A Law

Brian Resnick | Nextgov | February 6, 2013

Congress enacted the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in 1984, before there was a World Wide Web. And yet, it took Internet wunderkind Aaron Swartz’s apparent suicide for efforts to reform it to get traction. Sometimes to make a law, it takes a martyr...Now, in death, his accomplishments, coupled with his connections in Washington, are galvanizing to establish a law—“Aaron’s Law”— that would exonerate him. Read More »

America Is Declining At The Same Warp Speed That's Minting Billionaires And Destroying The Middle Class

CJ Werleman | AlterNet | May 5, 2014

America has the most billionaires in the world, but not a single U.S. city ranks among the world’s most livable cities...America looks increasingly like a Third World nation, and now new data shows America’s intellectual resources are also in decline...

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Big Tech Should Stay Out of Healthcare

Matthew Buck | Washington Monthly | December 2, 2019

...The use of digital technology in health care has enormous promise, to be sure. But, as the Wall Street Journal's coverage of Google's Project Nightingale revealed, there is also a potential dark side to these projects. Ascension, it noted, "also hopes to mine data to identify additional tests that could be necessary or other ways in which the system could generate more revenue from patients, documents show." That detail raises a key question that's largely overlooked in our health care debates: should the drive to maximize corporate revenues determine how health information technology develops and becomes integrated into medical practice, or should that be determined by medical science and the public?...An alternative path exists. In the 1970s, the Veterans Affairs Administration (VA) developed VistA, an open-source code system that was the country's first EHR system... Read More »

Darrell Issa Probing Prosecution Of Aaron Swartz, Internet Pioneer Who Killed Himself

Ryan J. Reilly, Ryan Grim, Zach Carter | Huffington Post | January 15, 2013

House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) is investigating the Justice Department's prosecution of Aaron Swartz, the Internet activist who committed suicide on Friday after fighting felony hacking charges for two years. [...] Read More »

Eilzabeth Warren: Internet 'Fast Lanes' Will Help 'Rich And Powerful'

Brendan Sasso | Nextgov.com | April 30, 2014

Sen. Elizabeth Warren urged the Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday to enact strong net-neutrality rules to ensure that all websites receive equal service.  "Reports that the FCC may gut net neutrality are disturbing, and would be just one more way the playing field is tilted for the rich and powerful who have already made it," the Massachusetts Democrat wrote in a Facebook post.

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Elizabeth Warren Grills Banking Regulators At First Hearing

Rachel Rose Hartman | Yahoo! News | February 15, 2013

[Americans] eager to see consumer champion Elizabeth Warren take Wall Street's biggest banks to task got their wish on Thursday when the newly elected Democratic senator made her debut at a Senate Banking Committee hearing. Read More »

Elizabeth Warren Questions FDA Rules for Limiting Antibiotics on Farms

Venessa Wong | Bloomberg Businessweek | March 14, 2014

New voluntary rules to limit the use of antibiotics in agriculture aren’t enough to satisfy Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). [...] Read More »

Elizabeth Warren's "Pharma Swear Jar" Idea

Derek | Corante | January 23, 2015

Elizabeth Warren has come out with a proposal for what she's calling a "pharmaceutical swear jar". Once a drug company had been fined, this bill would earmark a percentage of their profits over a multiyear period for use in NIH funding...

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FDA Antimicrobial Resistance Guidelines Fail to Address Root Causes

Last December, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) published two controversial documents on its website: Guidance 213 and the Veterinary Feed Directive (VFD). The guidelines stirred a firestorm of protests from public health offiicials who argue that the guidelines are too weak to prevent the continuing growth of antibiotic resistant germs...the crisis, as outlined by Dr. Joseph Mercola, is that we are now "facing the perfect storm to take us back to the pre-antibiotic age, when some of the most important advances in modern medicine – intensive care, organ transplants, care for premature babies, surgeries and even treatment for many common bacterial infections – will no longer be possible." Read More »

How A Small Group of Entrepreneurs Transformed Government Services

Aneesh Chopra | Nextgov.com | May 7, 2014

President Obama started with his own White House, recruiting Internet-savvy entrepreneurs to serve as chief technology officer (me), chief performance officer (Jeff Zients), chief information officer (Vivek Kundra) and director for social innovation (Sonal Shah), among other senior positions...

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How Doubling The Student Loan Interest Rate Hurts The United States

Josh Sager | The Progressive Cynic | July 2, 2013

University graduates are as vital a resource for the United States as anything that is mined, extracted, or farmed from nature. [...] In short, there is a very strong public interest for incentivizing intelligent students to aspire to a college education. Read More »

Instead of Medicare for All, How about VA for All?

I wonder -- why would people be calling for a new system that would still have thousands of private hospitals/facilities and millions of healthcare professionals, practicing FFS medicine using countless systems and data structures? In short, why aren't people calling for VA for All? Like Medicare, the VA -- more especially, its healthcare component, the Veterans Health Administration -- is charged with providing healthcare to a designed population, in this case, veterans. Unlike Medicare, though, it does so as an integrated health system (by far the largest in the U.S.), with 170 VA Medical Centers, over a thousand outpatient facilities, and somewhere over 100,000 physicians...it offers some of the finest care in the world. It offers a range of services that Medicare can only dream of, and it does so at, it is believed, lower costs than private coverage or even Medicare. Plus, it also was an innovator in electronic health records and is today in telehealth. What's not to like?

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Is It Time to Purchase Your Own Quantum Computer?

I want to talk about quantum computing – and why healthcare needs to looking ahead to it. Let’s start with this: for the low, low price of $5,000, you could have your very own quantum computer.  Spin Q Technology, a Chinese company, has recently introduced its Spin Q, a less expensive, less powerful version of its Spin Q Gemini, which went for $50,000.  Other quantum computers, such as those by Google, IBM, or D-Wave, have a few more zeroes in their price.  Spin Q Technology has a clear goal in offering this version:We believe that low-cost portable quantum computer products will facilitate hands-on experience for teaching quantum computing at all levels, well-prepare younger generations of students and researchers for the future of quantum technologies."

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Senators Launch Probe Of Massive Data Breaches

Dustin Volz | Nextgov | February 4, 2014

Several senators repeated calls for legislation to ward off massive data thefts during a hearing Monday to review the vulnerability of the nation's digital-payment systems, the first in a trio of sessions this week examining the enormous breaches sustained recently at retailers around the country. Read More »

TPP Treaty Could be a Serious Threat to US Public Health System

While trade agreements may seem to be another, albeit international species of wonkery, these agreements could have major effects on patients' and the public's health.  Since these concerns have been essentially ignored by the US medical and health care literature, (although they have appeared in UK journals, Australian, and New Zealand journals in English), they I will discuss them below. Worthy of further discussion is the possibility that these potential threats to health care and public health may arise not just from ideological disagreements, but also from health care corporations' increasing capture of government, facilitated by the conflicts of interest generated by the revolving door. Read More »