Isn't this what good critical journalism is about? There's nothing "default" or "lazy" about digging out uncomfortable facts and telling them. It's difficult to do well.
The article is full of little drive-bys, like "what about that neocolonialism?" What neocolonialism? Whose premise are they accepting? How does that premise, applied uniformly to all enterprise, implicate all of western civilization? Are we litigating modern capitalism through the lens of a tiny SF tech healthcare charity? Oh, wait, this is Salon; of course that's what we're doing. Or, "recently controversial investor [Paul Graham]" --- here Salon has literally synthesized a narrative from TechCrunch and Valleywag stories its reporter does not actually understand. Not only that, but it does so pointlessly; Graham's nonexistent controversy isn't relevant to the story even as written.
If this was a Wikipedia article, half of the text in the article would have little blue superscripts; "weasel words", "citation needed", "who?".
I know very little about Watsi, so I don't feel comfortable commenting on it in particular, but there are so many new businesses cropping up, and people are so prone to being critical in the startup world, that it would seem to make sense to try to get your defences out along with your initial publicity.
The author completely failed to do any real scrutiny here. Neocolonialism isn't about how awkward one westerner feels looking at pictures of others. Nothing was included about western Capital purchasing labor and resource rights from these countries, which could frame the need for the service in the first place. Namechecked indeed.
However, the rhetoric around start-ups places them as the fixers, leaders and disruptors of the economic order. Those claims invite and deserve critical analysis. It wouldn't be fair to have Watsi be a punching bag stand-in for the Dutch East India Company, but let's please not pretend that Watsi somehow stands outside of the economic order or that we shouldn't be skeptical of claims of disruption.