It has been an eventful few weeks, here are just a few things making a stir on social media…

Now that the election has ended, bloggers are offering their takes on the future of health care reform. Aaron Carroll gives his on  The JAMA Forum. The Kaiser Family Foundation has an interactive implementation timeline that allows users to view the roll-out of the law’s provisions by year and to filter by topic, a helpful tool for understanding this complex plan. Check out the timeline here.

In big news related to the cost of cancer treatments, The NY Times reported yesterday that the drug maker Sanofi has lowered the cost of a drug after MSKCC doctors highlighted the decision to exclude it from the formulary due to its high cost in a recent editorial piece (discussed in this post last month). It is heartening to see that an institution taking a stand on cost can have an impact, but this is only for one drug which will remain very expensive. Hopefully, however, this will lead to changes that will help patients.

The Pharma Strategy Blog has a post about the Zaltrap news as well, which discusses the issue of dosing and also brings up some troubling questions about reimbursement for the drug in non-academic settings.

Over at NPR’s Shots blog is the tale of a mumps outbreak and an embargo period which prevented journalists from reporting the entire story entitled, What We Wanted to Tell You About Mumps But Couldn’t.

At Occam’s Typewriter, the post Altmetrics: what’s the point? asks about the limits of altmetrics. What can altmetrics really measure and what can we really understand from them? This post has generated some lively discussion in the comments worth checking out if you are interested in this emerging area.