Healthy Skepticism Library item: 17162

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Electronic Source

Goozner M
Where's Harvard's Missing Health Policy Journal?
GoozNews 2008 Oct 20
http://www.gooznews.com/archives/001223.html

Full text:

The Pharmagossip website has an intriguing item up today regarding a journal published by the Harvard Interfaculty Initiative in Health Policy, chaired by prominent health economist Joseph Newhouse. The Spring 2008 issue of Harvard Health Policy Review, which sources say is a student-run publication, is missing. Try clicking on the Initiative’s website (here) and see for yourself.

The Harvard Health Policy Review clearly isn’t a prestigious publication. It isn’t indexed on PubMed. But it does attract prominent left-of-center academics to write for it, including, in the spring issue, Harvard’s Richard Freeman on “Global Health and the Problem of Governance” and Johns Hopkins’ Vincent Navarro on “The Politics of Healthcare Reforms in U.S. Presidential Elections.”

But, according to Pharmagossip, the glitch in the weblink may have more to do with an article by University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey sociologist Donald Light and University of Victoria economist Rebecca N. Warburton entitled “Ethical Standards for Healthcare Journal Editors: A Case Report and Recommendations.” The article (which you can read as it appeared in the hard copy of the journal here) dissects the distasteful editing process that Light and Warburton had to go through at the hands of the editors of the high impact Journal of Health Economics before they could publish their critical analysis (subscription required) of the famous (or some would say infamous) Tufts study that claims it costs over $800 million to develop a new drug. That study (which, ahem, I also disemboweled in a book still available from the University of California Press) was also published in the Journal of Health Economics, which is co-edited by — surprise! — Joseph Newhouse.

Pharmagossip asks: Can anyone out there shed some light on this missing article? But when I clicked on the journal, the entire edition (Spring 2008, Vol. 9, No. 1) was missing. So I will amend the query: Can anyone out there shed some light on this missing journal?