An amazing story behind this year's Nobel Prize

Behind this year's Nobel Prize in Medicine is a remarkable story of Mario R. Capecchi, who was born in Italy, survived the fascist regime to immigrate to the US, studied political science before moving to MIT and Harvard, and worked with the man who discovered the double helical structure of the DNA, James Watson. For academics, perhaps the most interesting part of Capecchi's story is that he left his faculty position at Harvard for the University of Utah, reportedly because of disagreements and infighting at Harvard and the atmosphere in Utah that allowed for more long-term projects instead of demanding immediate results. The article about Capecchi and the other two Nobel Prize winners in Medicine for 2007 is available from The New York Times. Here is an excerpt:

When young Mario was not yet 4, the Gestapo came to their home in Tyrol, in the Italian Alps, to take his mother to the Dachau concentration camp — an event he said he remembered vividly.

Because she knew her time of freedom was limited, she had sold all her possessions and given the proceeds to an Italian farming family, with whom Mario lived for about a year. When the money ran out, the family sent him on his way. He said he wandered south, moving from town to town as his cover was exposed. He wandered, usually alone, but sometimes in small gangs, begging and stealing, sleeping in the streets, occasionally in an orphanage.

Aging Gay in the USA

While it is not surprizing that older gay and lesbian Americans face prejudice and discrimination, it is only recently that the issue has been brought nation-wide attention as a number of social justice organizations have tried to educate the public and fight discrimination. An article in The New York Times by Jane Gross reports on the issue:

Elderly gay people like Ms. Donadello, living in nursing homes or assisted-living centers or receiving home care, increasingly report that they have been disrespected, shunned or mistreated in ways that range from hurtful to deadly, even leading some to commit suicide.

Some have seen their partners and friends insulted or isolated. Others live in fear of the day when they are dependent on strangers for the most personal care. That dread alone can be damaging, physically and emotionally, say geriatric doctors, psychiatrists and social workers.

The Health and Happiness of Nations

David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald, two researchers at NBER, found that happiness of nations, regardless of the number of physicians or a particular choice of survey used, is associated with lower levels of hypertension. The study adds yet another interesting, yet surely to be controversial, argument for continuing to expand the field of behavioral economics to better understand economic and consequently political individual behavior. Their article is available on the NBER site, and here is the abstract:

A modern statistical literature argues that countries such as Denmark are particularly happy while nations like East Germany are not. Are such claims credible? The paper explores this by building on two ideas. The first is that psychological well-being and high blood-pressure are thought by clinicians to be inversely correlated. The second is that blood-pressure problems can be reported more objectively than mental well-being. Using data on 16 countries, the paper finds that happier nations report lower levels of hypertension. The paper's results are consistent with, and seem to offer a step towards the validation of, cross-national estimates of well-being.

Clinton unveiled the highly-anticipated health care plan: $110 billion/year

Clinton unveiled her new health-care plan in Iowa. The New York Times reported the story here. As expected, the plan builds on the successful experience of Medicare, and in addition tries to help accommodate fears of those currently receiving high-quality private insurance. The plan will offer a wide degree of choice and offer a combination of subsidies for employer-provided insurance, private insurance, and government health insurance.

Two other Democratic candidates have different health care programs as a part of their campaign platform. Barack Obama's plan focuses on requiring employees to provide insurance and on expanding insurance for those worse off. John Edwards' program is similar to Clinton's in that it focuses on giving people the choice, but in addition promises to fund the new plan by increasing taxes on those at the top of the income distribution.

Epidemiology, trials and medical knowledge

While there is an increasing attention on monitoring drugs for safety after being approved by the FDA -- including large registries to study drug use and its effects in the 'real world setting' -- it is still remarkable how much confidence we put in the present-day state of medical knowledge. An analysis piece in the New York times points to the interesting dynamic of establishing then refuting, or revising scientific knowledge that affects the medical treatment of millions of Americans. Here is an excerpt from the article by Gary Taubes:
Many explanations have been offered to make sense of the here-today-gone-tomorrow nature of medical wisdom — what we are advised with confidence one year is reversed the next — but the simplest one is that it is the natural rhythm of science. An observation leads to a hypothesis. The hypothesis (last year’s advice) is tested, and it fails this year’s test, which is always the most likely outcome in any scientific endeavor. There are, after all, an infinite number of wrong hypotheses for every right one, and so the odds are always against any particular hypothesis being true, no matter how obvious or vitally important it might seem.
You can access the New York Times article here.

How expansion of state insurance can harm some children

Gruber and his colleagues at NBER found that for every 100 children who start receiving public health insurance about 60 lose their private insurance. They write about this new form of "crowding out" in their newest paper, published as an NBER working paper. The question then arises on how advocates of expanding state insurance can ensure that families affected are compensated for this welfare loss. Here is the abstract of their new paper:
he continued interest in public insurance expansions as a means of covering the uninsured highlights the importance of estimates of "crowd-out", or the extent to which such expansions reduce private insurance coverage. Ten years ago, Cutler and Gruber (1996) suggested that such crowd-out might be quite large, but much subsequent research has questioned this conclusion. We revisit this issue by using improved data and incorporating the research approaches that have led to varying estimates. We focus in particular on the public insurance expansions of the 1996-2002 period. Our results clearly show that crowd-out is significant; the central tendency in our results is a crowd-out rate of about 60%. This finding emerges most strongly when we consider family-level measures of public insurance eligibility. We also find that recent anti-crowd-out provisions in public expansions may have had the opposite effect, lowering take-up by the uninsured faster than they lower crowd-out of private insurance.

The paper can be accessed on the NBER website here.

Bush White House vs. Children Insurance

It seems that President Bush is determined to make it more difficult for uninsured children in California and New York to get their state's help in obtaining health insurance. The New York Times reports on the story:
The Bush administration, continuing its fight to stop states from expanding the popular Children’s Health Insurance Program, has adopted new standards that would make it much more difficult for New York, California and others to extend coverage to children in middle-income families.