Landmark Study Shatters Liberal Health Care Claims

During the health care debate, liberals argued that government had a moral duty to enact legislation that expanded health insurance among lower-income individuals. This was rooted in the assumption that obtaining health insurance translates into improved health. But a landmark study published in the New England Journal of Medicine dramatically undermines this assumption and shatters the rationale behind the law’s Medicaid expansion.

In 2008, Oregon expanded its Medicaid program, but because the state could not cover everybody, lawmakers opened up a lottery that randomly drew 30,000 names from a waiting list of almost 90,000 and allowed them to apply for the program. This created a unique opportunity for health researchers, ultimately allowing them to compare the health outcomes of 6,387 low-income adults who were able to enroll in the program with 5,842 who were not selected.

Contrary to liberal assumptions, researchers found that those who enrolled in Medicaid spent a lot more on medical care than those who weren’t able to enroll, but didn’t significantly improve their health outcomes.

Specifically, researchers found that those who received Medicaid increased their annual health care spending by $1,172, or 35 percent more than those who did not receive Medicaid. Those with Medicaid were more likely to be screened for diabetes and use diabetes medication and to make use of other preventive care measures. The study also examined health metrics including blood pressure and cholesterol.

Ultimately, the authors concluded that, “This randomized, controlled study showed that Medicaid coverage generated no significant improvements in measured health outcomes in the first two years, but it did increase use of health services, raise rates of diabetes detection and management, lower rates of depression, and reduce financial strain.”

So, the study suggests that expanding Medicaid is one way of reducing financial pressure on low-income groups, but it’s costly and does not improve their health.

Another interesting finding was that though medical spending increased among Medicaid enrollees due to more prescription drug usage and doctors’ visits, the study “did not find significant changes in visits to the emergency department or hospital admissions.” This undercuts another favorite talking point of liberals, which is that expanding insurance actually saves money by reducing costly emergency room visits.

Of course, this is just one study, and the authors offer some caveats. Among others, the study measured an average of about 17 months of health outcomes, so longer-run results may differ. Also, the study applied to Medicaid, rather than private insurance. But given that it had a sample size of over 12,000 and was so well designed, its conclusions will reverberate.

As the authors explain, “our study provides evidence of the effects of expanding Medicaid to low-income adults on the basis of a randomized design, which is rarely available in the evaluation of social insurance programs.”

Starting next year, millions more Americans will become eligible for Medicaid as a result of President Obama’s health care law. As Cato’s Michael Cannon put it, “There is no way to spin these results as anything but a rebuke to those who are pushing states to expand Medicaid. The Obama administration has been trying to convince states to throw more than a trillion additional taxpayer dollars at Medicaid by participating in the expansion, when the best-designed research available cannot find any evidence that it improves the physical health of enrollees. The OHIE even studied the most vulnerable part of the Medicaid-expansion population – those below 100 percent of the federal poverty level – yet still found no improvements in physical health.”

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Oregon Study Throws a Stop Sign in Front of ObamaCare’s Medicaid Expansion

Today, the nation’s top health economists released a study that throws a huge “STOP” sign in front of ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion.

The Oregon Health Insurance Experiment, or OHIE, may be the most important study ever conducted on health insurance. Oregon officials randomly assigned thousands of low-income Medicaid applicants – basically, the most vulnerable portion of the group that would receive coverage under ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion – either to receive Medicaid coverage, or nothing. Health economists then compared the people who got Medicaid to the people who didn’t. The OHIE is the only randomized, controlled study ever conducted on the effects of having health insurance versus no health insurance. Randomized, controlled studies are the gold standard of such research.

Consistent with lackluster results from the first year, the OHIE’s second-year results found no evidence that Medicaid improves the physical health of enrollees. There were some modest improvements in depression and financial strain–but it is likely those gains could be achieved at a much lower cost than through an extremely expensive program like Medicaid. Here are the study’s results and conclusions:

We found no significant effect of Medicaid coverage on the prevalence or diagnosis of hypertension or high cholesterol levels or on the use of medication for these conditions. Medicaid coverage significantly increased the probability of a diagnosis of diabetes and the use of diabetes medication, but we observed no significant effect on average glycated hemoglobin levels or on the percentage of participants with levels of 6.5% or higher. Medicaid coverage decreased the probability of a positive screening for depression [by 30 percent], increased the use of many preventive services, and nearly eliminated catastrophic out-of-pocket medical expenditures…

This randomized, controlled study showed that Medicaid coverage generated no significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes in the first 2 years, but it did increase use of health care services, raise rates of diabetes detection and management, lower rates of depression, and reduce financial strain.

As one of the study’s authors explained to me, it did not find any effect on mortality because the sample size is too small. Mortality rates among the targeted population – able-bodied adults 19-64 below 100 percent of poverty who aren’t already eligible for government health insurance programs – are already very low. So even if expanding Medicaid reduces mortality among this group, and there is ample room for doubt, the effect would be so small that this study would be unable to detect it. That too is reason not to implement the Medicaid expansion. This is not a population that is going to start dying in droves if states decline to participate.

There is no way to spin these results as anything but a rebuke to those who are pushing states to expand Medicaid. The Obama administration has been trying to convince states to throw more than a trillion additional taxpayer dollars at Medicaid by participating in the expansion, when the best-designed research available cannot find any evidence that it improves the physical health of enrollees. The OHIE even studied the most vulnerable part of the Medicaid-expansion population – those below 100 percent of the federal poverty level – yet still found no improvements in physical health.

If Medicaid partisans are still determined to do something, the only responsible route is to launch similar experiments in other states, with an even larger sample size, to determine if there is anything the OHIE might have missed. Or they could design smaller, lower-cost, more targeted efforts to reduce depression and financial strain among the poor. (I propose deregulating health care.) This study shows there is absolutely no warrant to expand Medicaid at all.

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Navidea advances on new Lymphoseek study data

NEW YORK -- Shares of Navidea Biopharmaceuticals Inc. rose Thursday after the company reported favorable new clinical trial results for its imaging agent Lymphoseek.

Navidea said Thursday that when patients were injected with Lymphoseek, doctors were able to identify cancerous lymph nodes in 38 out of 39 patients believed to have squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck.

The company said the results suggest doctors could use Lymphoseek to find cancerous lymph nodes in the head and neck without removing and dissecting dozens of additional nodes to search for cancer and determine how far a patient's cancer has spread. That could make surgeries less invasive.

Lymph nodes are small organs spread throughout the body, and they are an important part of the immune system.

The Food and Drug Administration approved Lymphoseek March 13 to help doctors locate lymph nodes in patients with breast cancer and skin cancer. The agency said Lymphoseek is the first new drug approved to help locate lymph nodes in more than 30 years.

Shares of the Dublin, Ohio, company gained 17 cents, or 6.6 percent, to $2.72 in morning trading. The stock has traded between $2.14 and $4.77 in the last year.

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Study: ‘Hobbled by High Cost, Hydrogen Fuel Cells Will Be a Modest $3 Billion Market in 2030′

Capital cost, not hydrogen supply, will limit adoption to a mere 5.9 GW, dashing dreams of a revolutionary energy future, says Lux Research

As I’ve said for a decade now, hydrogen fuel cells are not going to be a significant, cost-effective CO2 reducer. In a 2005 journal article, “The car and fuel of the future,” I noted that:

Using fuel cell vehicles and hydrogen from zero-carbon sources such as renewable power or nuclear energy has a cost of avoided carbon dioxide of more than $600 a metric ton, which is more than a factor of ten higher than most other strategies being considered today….

A 2013 study by independent research and advisory firm Lux Research finds that despite billions in research and development spent in the past decade, “The dream of a hydrogen economy envisioned for decades by politicians, economists, and environmentalists is no nearer, with hydrogen fuel cells turning a modest $3 billion market of about 5.9 GW in 2030.”

Hydrogen fuel cells won’t be a major contributor to solving the problem of manmade climate change until the market is 100 times larger, which simply won’t happen fast enough to matter to the climate fight, even in the unlikely event they ever become a cost-effective CO2 reducer.

The Lux study, “The Great Compression: The Future of the Hydrogen Economy” (client subs. req’d),  finds that “hydrogen demand from fuel cells will total 140 million kg in 2030, a meager 0.56% of global hydrogen demand.” Looks like I’m going to win my big hydrogen bet!

Here’s the rest of the news release from Lux:

Although the cost of hydrogen impacts fuel cell market adoption, hydrogen fuel accounts for only 35% of the total cost of ownership (TCO) for stationary applications and 21% of the TCO for mobile applications, with fuel cell capital costs and membrane replacement costs making up most of the difference.

“The hydrogen supply chain is not the most critical bottleneck for fuel cell adoption,” said Brian Warshay, Research Associate and the lead author of the report titled, “The Great Compression: the Future of the Hydrogen Economy.” “High capital costs and the low costs of incumbents provide a nearly insurmountable barrier to adoption, except in niche applications,” he added. In order to determine the economic viability and potential of an expansive hydrogen economy in the energy sectors, Lux Research conducted a detailed analysis of the costs of hydrogen generation, distribution, storage, and consumption in an effort to find the greatest constraints and opportunities. Among their findings:

Hydrogen generation accounts for less than 33% of the cost at the pump. The costs of hydrogen compression, storage, and distribution make up the majority of the cost of hydrogen, offering the greatest opportunities for improvement and innovation.PEM cells will have a $1 billion stationary market. Proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells for telecom power and backup will reach $1 billion in 2030, while fuel cells of all types for residential, commercial and utility generation will not prove cost-effective.Mobile applications will be worth $2 billion. PEM fuel cells will reach $2 billion on the backs of forklifts and light-duty vehicles, while buses will remain miniscule. A robust hydrogen vehicle fueling infrastructure is necessary but ultimately insufficient to overhaul the passenger vehicle market.Hydrogen demand from fuel cells will total 140 million kg in 2030, a meager 0.56% of global merchant hydrogen demand across all industries.

It is long past time to end the hype about hydrogen.

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STUDY: CVS, Rite Aid, And Other Chain Pharmacies Sell Generic Drugs At Up To 18 Times Their Cost

According to a new Consumer Reports investigative study published Thursday, there is rampant variation in the price of generic drugs as large U.S. pharmacy chains — including CVS, Rite Aid, and Target — mark up the prices of generic drug versions for common medications by as much as 18 times what wholesale chains like Costco charge. That price variance ends up costing Americans, who spend an average of $758 out-of-pocket on drugs every year, hundreds of dollars in unnecessary spending each month.

Consumer Reports compiled the data by contacting hundred of pharmacies throughout the country and asking what their drug prices were for generic versions of Lipitor, Plavix, Actos, and other common medications. The results were striking, with pharmacy representatives claiming that the higher prices were necessary for covering overhead, and considering that selling medication constitutes most of their revenue and profit margins:

Costco was the least expensive overall, and you don’t need to be a member to use its pharmacy. A few independent pharmacies came in even cheaper, though their prices varied widely, as did grocery-store pharmacies. The online retailers Healthwarehouse.com and FamilyMeds.com also had very low prices. On the other end of the spectrum, CVS, Rite Aid, and Target had the highest retail prices. [...]

A representative of CVS told us that its retail drug prices reflect other services offered by the chain, including drive-through windows, automated prescription refill systems, free outreach programs to help make sure patients are taking their prescriptions correctly, and 24-hour pharmacies. Costco pharmacies, the cheapest overall, are open only from 10 a.m. to 7 or 8:30 p.m. and are typically closed on Sundays.

“Big-box stores such as Costco and Walmart use the pharmacy as a traffic builder for their stores, whereas traditional chain stores, such as CVS, Rite Aid, and Walgreens, make the majority of their revenue and profits from the pharmacy,” says Stephen W. Schondelmeyer, Ph.D., Pharm.D., a professor of pharmacy economics at the University of Minnesota.

The study’s full findings are illustrated in this chart:

The use of generic drugs — rather than their brand name counterparts — actually drives down spending on medications, consequently lowering Americans’ out-of-pocket costs and government spending on public insurance programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. But the Consumer Reports investigation suggests there are significantly more savings to be had.

This isn’t the first time generic drug makers have been in the news this week. On Monday, the Supreme Court took up Federal Trade Commission (FTC) v. Actavis — which one expert dubbed “the health care reform case of 2013? — a case centering on the legality and antitrust implications of so-called “pay for delay” arrangements in which brand name drug makers pay off their generic drug counterparts to delay a drug’s generic version from entry into the market. If the FTC winds up winning that case, it could save Americans and the government billions of dollars on drug costs every year. But as this new report demonstrates, they could save much more if pharmacies stopped jacking up their rates to startling degrees.

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Bombshell IMF Study: United States Is World’s Number One Fossil Fuel Subsidizer

Between directly lowered prices, tax breaks, and the failure to properly price carbon, the world subsidized fossil fuel use by over $1.9 trillion in 2011 — or eight percent of global government revenues — according to a study released this week by the International Monetary Fund.

The biggest offender was by far the United States, clocking in at $502 billion. China came in second at $279 billion, and Russia was third at $116 billion. In fact, the problem is so significant in the U.S. that the IMF figures correcting it will require new fees, levies, or taxes totaling over $500 billion a year, or more than 3 percent of the economy.

The most significant finding is that most of the problem — a little over $1 trillion worth — is the failure to properly price carbon pollution. Global warming is the ultimate example of a “negative externality” — a market failure in which one market actor enjoys the benefits of an exchange while another actor pays the costs.

When we burn gasoline to power our cars or coal-fired electricity to run our homes, we enjoy the benefits of that energy use. But someone else — a farmer facing increased drought, coastal populations facing rising seas, or the global poor facing food supply disruptions — shoulders the burden of the added carbon pollution we’re dumping into the atmosphere. It’s the global ecological equivalent of tapping into your neighbor’s electrical wiring so that they wind up paying your utility bill.

The world’s advanced economies consume huge levels of fossil fuels, so the failure to properly build pollution costs into the consumer price of fossil fuel use — through a carbon tax or cap-and-trade-style system, or some other policy — is what makes these economic giants the biggest contributors to worldwide fossil fuel subsidies. Emerging and developing economies in Asia (which mainly means China) come in a decent second. “Pre-tax” subsidies, which are breaks built into the tax code along with other policies, contributed another $480 billion, mostly from countries in the Middle East and North Africa. The pre-tax subsidies of the advanced countries were negligible.

Finally, lots of countries have a national consumption tax called a VAT (or value added tax), and often offer breaks through it for energy purchases. The IMF had to calculate those separately for methodological reasons, and found they contributed several hundred billion dollars more, again largely from the advanced countries.

It’s worth noting that western Europe has an (admittedly troubled) carbon pollution reduction program, so the big externality subsidy created by the advanced economies can likely be blamed mostly on the United States.

In calculating the value of the externalities subsidy, the IMF assumed the global warming damages of carbon emissions at $25 per ton. They then went through the policies of various countries to see who is and isn’t making an attempt to work that price back in through taxation, and to what extent. But the report notes that various studies have pegged the price as high as $85 per ton — and other studies have put it much higher than that — in which case the size of the externality subsidy would be much larger. Beyond global warming, the IMF also attempted to account for other externalities, particularly the pollution and health effects of coal burning.

All told, the analysis found that eliminating all externality subsidies entirely would reduce carbon dioxide emissions as much as 13 percent, along with having lots of positive ripple effects by reducing fossil fuel demand and increasing investment and jobs in clean energy.

As for pre-tax” subsidies, they run the gamut from actual tax breaks for purchasing energy, to entire countries that, because they’re big oil exporters, sell petroleum to their own citizens at artificially low prices. The IMF compared the international price for petroleum products (adjusted for transport and retail costs) to the domestic consumer price in 176 countries between 2000 and 2011. The gap between the two was the effect of the subsidies. They did the same for natural gas, using 37 countries, and for coal, using 39 countries, between 2007 and 2011. Various other methods were used to fill in the gaps and do the same for electricity prices.

All told, these policies subsidized fossil fuels to the tune of $480 billion in 2011. Countries in the Middle East and North Africa contributed nearly half of that, with Central and Eastern Europe and the emerging and developing countries in Asia making up most of the rest.

What’s especially damaging is that a lot of the major contributors here spend more on pre-tax subsidies to fossil fuels, as a share of their economy, than they spend on their public health systems or public education. Brad Plumer at the Washington Post notes that Egypt “regularly spends up to 8 percent of its GDP subsidizing fossil fuels – more than it spends on education and public health combined – while running budget deficits of around … 8 percent of GDP.” Since many of these countries are developing with large impoverished populations, that kind of crowding out of public health spending and investments is a big deal.

The IMF also calculated that if pre-tax subsidies in all non-OECD countries were phased out, prices for crude oil, natural gas, and coal would drop 8 percent, 13 percent, and one percent in 2050, respectively. Removing all pre-tax subsidies worldwide would reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by as much as two percent.

One last thing to note is how this problem plays out in terms of global inequality. The IMF found that most of these subsidies benefit the upper class: In low and middle income countries, the richest 20 percent of households captured 43 percent of the subsidy benefits, on average. For gasoline subsidies specifically, they captured a whopping 61 percent.

That doesn’t mean eliminating these subsidies won’t hurt poorer households. Because their incomes are so much lower, losing those subsidies can take a significant bite out of their resources, even if the share of the benefits they’re getting is a small portion of the total value of those subsidies. What it does mean is that these countries could help the poor much more efficiently by eliminating the energy subsidies and then just providing direct assistance to people in need.

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GOP Lawmakers Press For Study Of Health Law's Effect On Wages

House Republicans told the Obama administration on Thursday that it needs to get moving on a study of how the Affordable Care Act will affect wages.

The healthcare law requires the Labor Department to study whether new regulations under the law will lead to a reduction in workers' pay. 

Reps. John Kline (R-Minn.) and Phil Roe (R-Tenn.) said the Labor Department must move forward with the study before finalizing the policies that might affect employment and wages.

"The Department of Labor has a legal obligation to study how the health care law will affect workers’ wages, yet it has failed to do so," the lawmakers said. "Meanwhile, the federal bureaucracy is busy implementing the law at a time when wages are stagnant and 12 million [people] are searching for work."

They noted recent surveys, conducted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as well as the Federal Reserve, in which employers said they're holding off on new hires until the healthcare law is fully in place and they can see how they're affected by its employer mandate.

Some businesses have also threatened to cut their employees' hours so they won't have to provide healthcare benefits, although some major firms later backed off those ideas amid bad publicity.

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Study: Premiums Could Rise Average Of 40 Percent Under ObamaCare

Health insurance premiums could rise by as much as 40 percent as a result of President Obama's healthcare law, according to a new study.

The survey of premiums in six states found that premiums could increase most significantly for young, healthy men. 

Premiums will rise for people who currently purchase bare-bones plans with high deductibles and meager coverage. They'll be forced to upgrade to policies that must offer at least a certain level of coverage.

Democrats say many of the meager policies on the market today give people a false sense of security — they think they have health insurance, but their policies don't actually cover the services they're most likely to need, even in an emergency.

Republicans argue that forcing consumers to purchase different plans violates President Obama's pledge that people who like their healthcare coverage can keep it. The changes impose higher costs on those who can least afford it, critics say.

Most people who see their premiums rise will get help from the federal government to help cover the additional costs, according to Thursday's survey, which was conducted by the Milliman consulting firm on behalf of Center Forward.

The healthcare law establishes new insurance exchanges in each state. The exchanges are primarily for people who buy coverage on their own, rather than purchasing insurance through an employer. 

People in the individual market currently tend to choose policies that don't offer much coverage and carry high out-of-pocket costs for the services they do cover, according to Milliman's research. 

The firm analyzed the individual markets in six states with varying degrees of regulation already in place. In New Jersey, where insurance is already highly regulated, the healthcare law won't lead to much of a premium hike at all — in fact, consumers could see their costs fall by as much as 25 percent.

But in states that don't already restrict meager insurance policies, the healthcare law could have a bigger impact. In Florida and Ohio, premiums for one of the cheapest individual policies allowed under ObamaCare could cost upwards of 50 percent more than the more bare-bones plans available now.

Across the six states studied, 40 to 60 percent of people on the individual market will be eligible for subsidies to help offset the cost of insurance, Milliman found.

The law provides subsidies, based on income, to help cover premiums, as well as separate subsidies to defray out-of-pocket costs. Even if underlying premiums rise, many people will see their own costs fall because of the help they'll get from subsidies, Milliman said.

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Study: Iraq War Cost U.S. $2.2 Trillion, Claimed Nearly 200,000 Lives

A new report by the “Costs of War” project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies finds that nearly 200,000 people, including soldiers and civilians, were killed in the war in Iraq President George W. Bush launched 10 years ago.

The report also found that American taxpayers will ultimately spend roughly $2.2 trillion on the war, but because the U.S. government borrowed to finance the conflict, interest payments through the year 2053 means that the total bill could reach nearly $4 trillion.

“Nearly every government that goes to war underestimates its duration, neglects to tally all the costs, and overestimates the political objectives that will be accomplished by war’s violence,” said Boston University professor of political science and project co-director Neta C. Crawford.

Indeed, the war devastated the Iraqi health care system and allowed militants to hone their skills and export them to neighboring conflicts:

Terrorism in Iraq increased dramatically as a result of the invasion and tactics and fighters were exported to Syria and other neighboring countries.

Iraq’s health care infrastructure remains devastated from sanctions and war. More than half of Iraq’s medical doctors left the country during the 2000s, and tens of thousands of Iraqi patients are forced to seek health care outside the country.

The Watson Institute project — which involves “30 economists, anthropologists, lawyers, humanitarian personnel, and political scientists from 15 universities, the United Nations, and other organizations” — comes on the heals of the Special Inspector-General for Iraq Reconstruction’s final report released last week finding that the U.S. spent $60 billion on reconstruction efforts in Iraq and that $10 billion of it was wasted on fraud and abuse.

Reuters reported that Steven Bucci, the military assistant to former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in the run-up to the war and today a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, didn’t dispute the report’s findings but said the U.S.’s post-invasion battles with al-Qaeda in Iraq — a group that did not exist prior to March 19, 2003 — made the war worth it.

“It was really in Iraq that ‘al Qaeda central’ died,” Bucci said. “They got waxed.”

Meanwhile, the AP reported this afternoon that “a string of explosions tore through central Baghdad within minutes of each other on Thursday, followed by what appeared to be a coordinated assault by gunmen who battled security forces in the Iraqi capital.” The AP said the attack — which reportedly killed 12 people — “bore the hallmarks of Al Qaeda’s Iraq arm.”

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Study Explores Why Wrongful Convictions Happen

In the almost 25 years since post-conviction DNA evidence has been used to establish criminal innocence, public perception has been transformed by the realization that completely erroneous convictions are not uncommon, even in cases that land defendants on death row or in prison for life. A new exhaustive social science analysis of many of these exonerations since 1989 has identified ten primary factors that, together, have led to the convictions we now know were wrong.

The study by American University’s School of Public Affairs concludes that it is a confluence of circumstances – and the ultimate failure of prosecutors and/or defense attorneys to mitigate those circumstances – that makes the difference between a “near-miss” in which a person is indicted but never found guilty, and a wrongful conviction.

Some of the worst wrongful conviction cases have been linked to what is known as “tunnel vision,” in which a prosecutor who hones in one suspect has a tendency to reinforce beliefs of that suspect’s guilt, even when the evidence suggests otherwise. In fact, the American University study finds that, surprisingly, it is in cases with the weakest evidence that “tunnel vision” is most likely to be a problem. The scholars explain:

As more resources—money, time, and emotions—are placed into a narrative involving a suspect, the actors involved are less willing or able to process negative feedback that refutes their conclusions. Instead, actors want to devote additional resources in order to recoup their original investment. As a result, evidence that points away from a suspect is ignored or devalued, and latent errors are overlooked. At this point, the police are working to rule in rather than rule out the suspect, and prosecutors have moved from “inspection” mode to “selling” mode. Escalation of commitment contributes and facilitates system breakdown because it dismantles the rigorous testing of evidence that makes the adversarial process function effectively.

To a large extent, the panelists attributed tunnel vision in our cases to a police and prosecutorial culture in which questioning and independent thinking were not valued, procedures were not designed to probe already gathered evidence, and little or no concern was given to learning from past errors. Even if safeguards, such as those mentioned above, are in place, they cannot be used effectively when the officials in the system are blinded by tunnel vision.

The study points out that defense attorneys can also suffer from “tunnel vision” when they fail to question the prevailing narrative. The ten factors that may lead to “tunnel vision” and other iterations of what they call the “perfect storm” are: weak evidence by the prosecution, weak defense (including the use of family witnesses), the prosecution withholding exculpatory evidence, forensic error, inadvertent misidentification of a witness, lying by a non-witness, youth of a defendant, any criminal history by the defendant and the punitiveness of the state. This last factor is particularly noteworthy because it is not at all contingent on flaws in individual cases and thus probably the easiest to address through reform and public education. The study explains:

In a punitive legal culture, police and prosecutors may be more interested in obtaining a conviction at all costs (leading to greater Brady violations, etc.) and community pressure may encourage overly swift resolutions to cases involving serious crimes like rape and murder. Additionally, state punitiveness could contribute to more state actors assuming the defendant’s guilt. This culture eventually works against the defendant, as state agents overlook or under-value evidence that contradicts the assumption of guilt.

While the study, the result of three years of research, provides new social science data that focuses exclusively on what happens to an individual once indicted (a wrongful indictment can be caused by false confessions, eyewitness identifications and other factors), its conclusions and recommendations are not dissimilar from those of many wrongful conviction experts and commissions – that “tunnel vision” is a primary concern, and that formal “checklists,” along with a mechanism for routinely reviewing causes of wrongful convictions, are crucial for reform.

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STUDY: Voter ID Laws Affect Young Minorities Most

A new study by professors at the University of Chicago and Washington University in St. Louis shows that the strict voter ID laws being pushed by Republican state legislators around the country most impact young people, especially young minorities. And given that the people pushing those measures admitted they were intended to help GOP candidates win, the analysis would suggest that the efforts are having their intended effect.

Politico reported Tuesday that the study, co-authored by Cathy J. Cohen of the University of Chicago and Jon C. Rogowski of Washington University in St. Louis, found that even in states without photo ID laws, “65.5 percent of black youth were asked to show ID at the polls, compared with 55.3 percent of Latino youth and 42.8 percent of white youth.”

Worse, the study finds, many minority young voters — including 17.3 percent of young African Americans — did not even try to vote because they lacked the required identification.
The authors noted that their findings show the problem with these suppression laws — and show the continued need for the Voting Rights Act:

“The effort to protect the vote doesn’t make sense and it’s largely discriminatory, impacting we know, young people in particular, young people of color, the poor and the elderly,” Cohen said. … Rogowski said the study will help underscore the importance of keeping Section 5 fully in place. “It’s important that we still have the ability to keep a watchful eye on these kinds of states,” Rogowski said.

Last June, Pennsylvania House Republican Leader Mike Turzai boasted that the voter ID law he helped pass would “allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.” In December, Republican strategist Scott Tranter acknowledged that “a lot of us are campaign professionals and we want to do everything we can to help our sides. Sometimes we think that’s voter ID, sometimes we think that’s longer lines, whatever it may be.”

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Heart stent with new polymer matches Abbott top seller in study

March 10 (Reuters) - A drug-coated heart stent from Japan's Terumo Corp with a dissolving polymer proved just as effective as Abbott Laboratories' top-selling Xience stent at preventing a second procedure to clear the artery, a large study found.

Stents are small wire-mesh structures inserted into narrowed coronary arteries to restore proper blood flow. Many models are coated with a polymer that slowly releases a drug designed to prevent another blockage and repeat procedure.

New drug-coated stents with dissolving polymers are being developed in response to data showing the older so-called durable polymers may trigger an inflammatory reaction that raises a patient's stroke risk.

In the study of more than 3,200 patients, Terumo's Nobori stent met its primary goal of non-inferiority to the Xience stent one year after implantation, with 4.2 percent of patients in both groups requiring a repeat procedure.

Patients also had low similar rates of stent thrombosis, or device-related blood clot formation, with both the Nobori and Xience stents. The study, sponsored by Terumo and conducted by researchers at Kyoto University, was presented Sunday at the American College of Cardiology scientific meeting in San Francisco.

Abbott's Xience stent is the market leader in Japan with a 50 percent share and the top-selling U.S. drug-coated stent with a 40 percent share.

The company is developing a new stent, called Absorb, that completely dissolves away in the body. It will present data on that device at the ACC meeting on Monday.

Abbott's U.S. stent rivals are Boston Scientific Corp and Medtronic Inc.

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Oregon Study Throws a Stop Sign in Front of ObamaCare’s Medicaid Expansion

Today, the nation’s top health economists released a study that throws a huge “STOP” sign in front of ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion.

The Oregon Health Insurance Experiment, or OHIE, may be the most important study ever conducted on health insurance. Oregon officials randomly assigned thousands of low-income Medicaid applicants – basically, the most vulnerable portion of the group that would receive coverage under ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion – either to receive Medicaid coverage, or nothing. Health economists then compared the people who got Medicaid to the people who didn’t. The OHIE is the only randomized, controlled study ever conducted on the effects of having health insurance versus no health insurance. Randomized, controlled studies are the gold standard of such research.

Consistent with lackluster results from the first year, the OHIE’s second-year results found no evidence that Medicaid improves the physical health of enrollees. There were some modest improvements in depression and financial strain–but it is likely those gains could be achieved at a much lower cost than through an extremely expensive program like Medicaid. Here are the study’s results and conclusions:

We found no significant effect of Medicaid coverage on the prevalence or diagnosis of hypertension or high cholesterol levels or on the use of medication for these conditions. Medicaid coverage significantly increased the probability of a diagnosis of diabetes and the use of diabetes medication, but we observed no significant effect on average glycated hemoglobin levels or on the percentage of participants with levels of 6.5% or higher. Medicaid coverage decreased the probability of a positive screening for depression [by 30 percent], increased the use of many preventive services, and nearly eliminated catastrophic out-of-pocket medical expenditures…

This randomized, controlled study showed that Medicaid coverage generated no significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes in the first 2 years, but it did increase use of health care services, raise rates of diabetes detection and management, lower rates of depression, and reduce financial strain.

As one of the study’s authors explained to me, it did not find any effect on mortality because the sample size is too small. Mortality rates among the targeted population – able-bodied adults 19-64 below 100 percent of poverty who aren’t already eligible for government health insurance programs – are already very low. So even if expanding Medicaid reduces mortality among this group, and there is ample room for doubt, the effect would be so small that this study would be unable to detect it. That too is reason not to implement the Medicaid expansion. This is not a population that is going to start dying in droves if states decline to participate.

There is no way to spin these results as anything but a rebuke to those who are pushing states to expand Medicaid. The Obama administration has been trying to convince states to throw more than a trillion additional taxpayer dollars at Medicaid by participating in the expansion, when the best-designed research available cannot find any evidence that it improves the physical health of enrollees. The OHIE even studied the most vulnerable part of the Medicaid-expansion population – those below 100 percent of the federal poverty level – yet still found no improvements in physical health.

If Medicaid partisans are still determined to do something, the only responsible route is to launch similar experiments in other states, with an even larger sample size, to determine if there is anything the OHIE might have missed. Or they could design smaller, lower-cost, more targeted efforts to reduce depression and financial strain among the poor. (I propose deregulating health care.) This study shows there is absolutely no warrant to expand Medicaid at all.

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Landmark Study Shatters Liberal Health Care Claims

During the health care debate, liberals argued that government had a moral duty to enact legislation that expanded health insurance among lower-income individuals. This was rooted in the assumption that obtaining health insurance translates into improved health. But a landmark study published in the New England Journal of Medicine dramatically undermines this assumption and shatters the rationale behind the law’s Medicaid expansion.

In 2008, Oregon expanded its Medicaid program, but because the state could not cover everybody, lawmakers opened up a lottery that randomly drew 30,000 names from a waiting list of almost 90,000 and allowed them to apply for the program. This created a unique opportunity for health researchers, ultimately allowing them to compare the health outcomes of 6,387 low-income adults who were able to enroll in the program with 5,842 who were not selected.

Contrary to liberal assumptions, researchers found that those who enrolled in Medicaid spent a lot more on medical care than those who weren’t able to enroll, but didn’t significantly improve their health outcomes.

Specifically, researchers found that those who received Medicaid increased their annual health care spending by $1,172, or 35 percent more than those who did not receive Medicaid. Those with Medicaid were more likely to be screened for diabetes and use diabetes medication and to make use of other preventive care measures. The study also examined health metrics including blood pressure and cholesterol.

Ultimately, the authors concluded that, “This randomized, controlled study showed that Medicaid coverage generated no significant improvements in measured health outcomes in the first two years, but it did increase use of health services, raise rates of diabetes detection and management, lower rates of depression, and reduce financial strain.”

So, the study suggests that expanding Medicaid is one way of reducing financial pressure on low-income groups, but it’s costly and does not improve their health.

Another interesting finding was that though medical spending increased among Medicaid enrollees due to more prescription drug usage and doctors’ visits, the study “did not find significant changes in visits to the emergency department or hospital admissions.” This undercuts another favorite talking point of liberals, which is that expanding insurance actually saves money by reducing costly emergency room visits.

Of course, this is just one study, and the authors offer some caveats. Among others, the study measured an average of about 17 months of health outcomes, so longer-run results may differ. Also, the study applied to Medicaid, rather than private insurance. But given that it had a sample size of over 12,000 and was so well designed, its conclusions will reverberate.

As the authors explain, “our study provides evidence of the effects of expanding Medicaid to low-income adults on the basis of a randomized design, which is rarely available in the evaluation of social insurance programs.”

Starting next year, millions more Americans will become eligible for Medicaid as a result of President Obama’s health care law. As Cato’s Michael Cannon put it, “There is no way to spin these results as anything but a rebuke to those who are pushing states to expand Medicaid. The Obama administration has been trying to convince states to throw more than a trillion additional taxpayer dollars at Medicaid by participating in the expansion, when the best-designed research available cannot find any evidence that it improves the physical health of enrollees. The OHIE even studied the most vulnerable part of the Medicaid-expansion population – those below 100 percent of the federal poverty level – yet still found no improvements in physical health.”

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STUDY: Same-Sex Parents Are Prevalent, Ethnically Diverse, And Struggling Economically

A new report from the Williams Institute paints a compelling picture of the nation’s same-sex couples, as well as the LGBT people in general who have had children. Not only are they particular prevalent, but they are also ethnically diverse. Unfortunately, many are struggling economically, contrary to stereotype.

Here are some of the compelling new data points:

Over a third (37 percent) of LGBT-identified adults have had a child at some time in their lives.An estimated 3 million LGBT Americans have had a child and as many as 6 million Americans have an LGBT parent.Nearly half (48 percent) of all LGBT female couples and 20 percent of LGBT male couples under the age of 50 are raising children.More than 125,000 same-sex couple households (19 percent) are raising over 220,000 children under the age of 18.Same-sex couples who consider themselves to be spouses are twice as likely (31 percent) to be raising children compared to unmarried same-sex partners (14 percent).Same-sex couples are four times more likely to be raising adopted children compared to opposite-sex couples, raising more than 22,000 adopted children.About 39 percent of individuals in same-sex couples raising children are people of color (compared to 36 percent among opposite-sex couples).Half of all children living with same-sex couples are non-White (compared to 41 percent among opposite-sex couples.)Single LGBT adults raising children are three times more likely than similar non-LGBT people to report household incomes near the poverty threshold.Same-sex couples living in two-adult households with children are twice as likely to report household incomes near the poverty threshold compared to similar non-LGBT people.The median annual household income of same-sex couples with children is significantly lower than that of similar opposite-sex couples ($63,900 versus $74,000, respectively).

These results actually confirm that what conservatives claim about marriage applies to same-sex couples equally. Marriage is an important framework with key economic benefits that specifically support children. With helpful research like this made available, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for opponents of LGBT equality to claim that same-sex families are not already a significant reality.

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Study Confirms Tea Party Was Created by Big Tobacco and Pollutocrat Kochs

By Brendan DeMille via DeSmogBlog

A new academic study confirms that front groups with longstanding ties to the tobacco industry and the billionaire Koch brothers planned the formation of the Tea Party movement more than a decade before it exploded onto the U.S. political scene.

Far from a genuine grassroots uprising, this astroturf effort was curated by wealthy industrialists years in advance. Many of the anti-science operatives who defended cigarettes are currently deploying their tobacco-inspired playbook internationally to evade accountability for the fossil fuel industry’s role in driving climate disruption.

The study, funded by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institute of Health, traces the roots of the Tea Party’s anti-tax movement back to the early 1980s when tobacco companies began to invest in third party groups to fight excise taxes on cigarettes, as well as health studies finding a link between cancer and secondhand cigarette smoke.

Published in the peer-reviewed academic journal, Tobacco Control, the study titled, ‘To quarterback behind the scenes, third party efforts’: the tobacco industry and the Tea Party, is not just an historical account of activities in a bygone era. As senior author, Stanton Glantz, a University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) professor of medicine, writes:

“Nonprofit organizations associated with the Tea Party have longstanding ties to tobacco companies, and continue to advocate on behalf of the tobacco industry’s anti-tax, anti-regulation agenda.”

The two main organizations identified in the UCSF Quarterback study are Americans for Prosperity and Freedomworks. Both groups are now “supporting the tobacco companies’ political agenda by mobilizing local Tea Party opposition to tobacco taxes and smoke-free laws.” Freedomworks and Americans for Prosperity were once a single organization called Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE). CSE was founded in 1984 by the infamous Koch Brothers, David and Charles Koch, and received over $5.3 million from tobacco companies, mainly Philip Morris, between 1991 and 2004.

In 1990, Tim Hyde, RJR Tobacco’s head of national field operations, in an eerily similar description of the Tea Party today, explained why groups like CSE were important to the tobacco industry’s fight against government regulation. Hyde wrote:

“… coalition building should proceed along two tracks: a) a grassroots organizational and largely local track,; b) and a national, intellectual track within the DC-New York corridor. Ultimately, we are talking about a “movement,” a national effort to change the way people think about government’s (and big business) role in our lives. Any such effort requires an intellectual foundation – a set of theoretical and ideological arguments on its behalf.”

The common public understanding of the origins of the Tea Party is that it is a popular grassroots uprising that began with anti-tax protests in 2009.

However, the Quarterback study reveals that in 2002, the Kochs and tobacco-backed CSE designed and made public the first Tea Party Movement website under the web address www.usteaparty.com. Here’s a screenshot of the archived U.S. Tea Party site, as it appeared online on Sept. 13, 2002:

CSE describes the U.S. Tea Party site, “In 2002, our U.S. Tea Party is a national event, hosted continuously online, and open to all Americans who feel our taxes are too high and the tax code is too complicated.” The site features a “Patriot Guest book” where supporters can write a message of support for CSE and the U.S. Tea Party movement.

Sometime around September 2011, the U.S. Tea Party site was taken offline. According to the DNS registry, the web address www.usteaparty.com is currently owned by Freedomworks.

The implications of the UCSF Quarterback report are widespread. The main concern expressed by the authors lies in what they see happening overseas as the Tea Party movement expands internationally, training activists in 30 countries including Israel, Georgia, Japan and Serbia.

As the authors explain:

“This international expansion makes it likely that Tea Party organizations will be mounting opposition to tobacco control (and other health) policies as they have done in the USA.”

Freedomworks and Americans for Prosperity are both multi-issue organizations that have expanded their battles to include other policies they see as threats to the free market principles they claim to defend, namely fighting health care reform and regulations on global warming pollution. The report’s warning about overseas expansion efforts by Freedomworks should therefore also be heeded by groups in the health and environment arenas.

Finally, this report might serve as a wake-up call to some people in the Tea Party itself, who would find it a little disturbing that the “grassroots” movement they are so emotionally attached to, is in fact a pawn created by billionaires and large corporations with little interest in fighting for the rights of the common person, but instead using the common person to fight for their own unfettered profits.

– Brendan DeMille reposted from DeSmogBlog with permission

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Lilly stops rheumatoid arthritis treatment study

INDIANAPOLIS -- Drug developer Eli Lilly and Co. is stopping clinical testing of an experimental rheumatoid arthritis treatment because it wasn't working.

The Indianapolis company said Thursday it will continue studying the potential drug, tabalumab, as a possible treatment for a form of the autoimmune disorder lupus and the bone marrow cancer multiple myeloma.

Lilly said in December it stopped a late-stage study of tabalumab due to a lack of effectiveness. The company announced Thursday that it decided to end additional mid- and late-stage research after further analyzing data. It said the decision was not based on safety concerns.

Late-stage studies are generally the last and most expensive phase of testing a drug undergoes before the developer asks regulators to approve it.

Rheumatoid arthritis is a major area of research for drug companies because it is a chronic condition, meaning patients will likely take the drugs regularly for a long time. In November, the Food and Drug Administration approved a new treatment for the disease, Pfizer Inc.'s twice-a-day pill Xeljanz.

Lilly shares fell 46 cents to $53.47 in morning trading.

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Study: Global Warming Causes Most Monthly Heat Records Today

by Dana Nuccitelli, via Skeptical Science

A new paper published in Climatic Change by Coumou, Robinson, and Rahmstorf (CRR13) examines the increased frequency of record-breaking monthly temperature records over the past 130 years, finding that these records are now five times more likely to occur due to global warming, with much more to come.

“…worldwide, the number of local record-breaking monthly temperature extremes is now on average five times larger than expected in a climate with no long-term warming. This implies that on average there is an 80% chance that a new monthly heat record is due to climatic change … Under a medium global warming scenario, by the 2040s we predict the number of monthly heat records globally to be more than 12 times as high as in a climate with no long-term warming.”

Figure 1: Observed record ratio (the increase in the number of heat records compared to those expected in a world without global warming) for monthly heat records as it changes over time (thin red line is annual data, thick red line smoothed with half-width 5 years). This is compared with predictions from a simple stochastic model based only on the global mean temperature evolution (blue line with uncertainty band directly comparable to the smoothed red curve)

CRR13 considers the formula for the probability of a record-breaking extreme in a Gaussian (bell curve) time series with a linear long-term warming trend, compared to the much more simplified version of the same formula when there is no warming trend.  The paper then examines the ratio of those two equations – the increased frequency of record-breaking extreme heat events in a warming world.

The study uses global surface temperature data provided by the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) for 1880–2010, in 2° by 2° grids across the globe, excluding polar regions above 70° latitude due to the sparse temperature station coverage there  They examine the temperature data for each calendar month of the year.

CRR13 finds that the number of observed heat records is much larger than one would have expected in a climate with no long term warming, and many monthly heat records have been broken over the past decade.

In Figure 2 below, the increase in observed monthly heat records in the past decade over the most recent 40-year period of data (left column) are compared to the modeled results (right column) for northern hemisphere summer (top row), winter (middle row), and the whole year (bottom row).

Figure 2: Global maps of the observed record ratio (the increase in the number of heat records compared to those expected in a world without global warming) as observed (left panels) and estimated by the model (right panels) using the 1971–2010 dataset. a and b show boreal summer results (June-July-August), c and d austral summer results (December-January-February) and e and f results for all months.

Figure 3 looks at the increase in heat records over the past decade as compared to the full 131-year dataset. The similarity between Figures 2 and 3 shows that over the past decade, the monthly records in the past decade as compared to the past 40 years are usually also records as compared to the past 131 years.

The bottom right panel (d) also shows the probability that a monthly heat record in a given location is due to global warming, with blue indicating 0% probability and red indicating 100%.

Figure 3: Global maps of the observed record ratio over the past decade (the increase in the number of heat records compared to those expected in a world without global warming) over the 1880–2010 dataset, for a boreal summers (June-July-August), b austral summers (December-January-February) and c all months. d Risk map showing the probability that a record-breaking event in the last decade is due to climatic change.

In Figure 1 above, CRR13 extends the model forward assuming global warming based on a moderate emissions scenario, Representative Concentrations Pathway (RCP) 4.5, in which human greenhouse gas emissions peak around the year 2040, ultimately causing a radiative forcing (global energy imbalance) of 4.5 Watts per square meter in 2100 (a doubling of atmospheric CO2 would cause a forcing of about 3.7 Watts per square meter).  This scenario would ultimately lead to about 3.6°C global surface warming above pre-industrial levels, which is a very dangerous and possibly catastrophic amount of global warming, but certainly not a worst case scenario.  It essentially represents a scenario where we take too-slow and gradual action to reduce human greenhouse gas emissions, and at the moment seems fairly realistic.

In this scenario, CRR13 finds that by 2040, monthly heat records will have become approximately 12 times more likely to occur than in a non-warming world,

“…approximately 80% of the recent monthly heat records would not have occurred without human influence on climate. Under a medium future global warming scenario this share will increase to more than 90% by 2040.”

As lead author Coumou noted, this is even worse than it sounds, because breaking a heat record in 2040 will require much higher temperatures than breaking a record today.

“Now this doesn’t mean there will be 12 times more hot summers in Europe than today – it actually is worse.  To count as new records, they actually have to beat heat records set in the 2020s and 2030s, which will already be hotter than anything we have experienced to date.  And this is just the global average – in some continental regions, the increase in new records will be even greater.”

The results of this research are consistent with those of Hansen et al. (2012), which found that global warming is shifting the temperature distribution to make extreme heat waves more likely to occur, similar to the findings of several other studies such as Donat and Alexander (2012) and Meehl et al. (2009).

Source: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center GISS and Scientific Visualization Studio

To sum up the results of this study,

Record-breaking monthly temperature records are already occurring five times more often than they would in the absence of human-caused global warming.There is an 80% chance that any monthly heat record today is due to human-caused global warming.Unless we take steps to significantly reduce human greenhouse gas emissions and global warming, by 2040 the frequency of monthly heat records will become 12 times the rate in a non-warming world, and we will be able to blame more than 90% of heat records on global warming.

This would of course be bad news.  For example, as shown by Hawkins et al. (2012), crops tend not to respond well to extreme heat, so these findings could pose a significant problem for global food production, as well as increasing heat fatalities, requiring costly adaptive measures to prepare people for more frequent extreme heat waves.  In January of 2013, Australia has been trying to cope with this sort of extreme heat, which has resulted in devastating wildfires and other nasty consequences.

CRR13 presents a reality which we should try very hard to reverse, and a possible future we need to do our best to avoid.

– This piece was originally published at Skeptical Science and was re-printed with permission.

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Fed Study Suggests A Central Idea Underlying Obamacare Is Wrong

A core idea at the heart of President Obama’s healthcare reform law is the notion that while expanding coverage is expensive, there are huge offsetting savings to be had from reforming how medicine is practiced by doctors and hospitals. Who knows, maybe a third of the $2.7 trillion spent on healthcare is wasted.

Now this notion is based mostly on the research of the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice. It shows Medicare spending in some regions of the country is significantly higher than others. Kaiser Health News: “This geographic variation in spending, which the government has also examined, was a motivating force behind a number of government initiatives including changes in Medicare payment to reward hospitals and doctors who provide good care efficiently.”

And if that research is wrong? Well, then we have a problem. And a paper from a Federal Reserve economist suggests just that (via KHN):

[T]he variation in Medicare spending across states is attributable to factors that affect health and health behaviors, rather than practice styles. … It is not surprising that states in the South spend more on Medicare and have worse outcomes. These states perform significantly worse in numerous areas, including high school graduation rates, test scores, insurance, unemployment, violent crime, and teenage pregnancy. There are many ways that such differences can affect health utilization and outcomes, including differences in underlying health, social supports and social stressors, patient self-care and advocacy, ease of access to services, capabilities and quality of hospital and physician nurses and technicians, and cultural differences in attitudes toward care. A comparison of health spending in Mississippi with health spending in Minnesota is not likely to provide a usual metric of the ‘inefficiencies’ of the health system, nor is likely to provide a useful guide to improve the quality of care in places where it is lacking.

Certainly this is still an open issue, as the KHN article makes clear. But the fact that it is — and that we still rejiggered a fifth of the economy partly based on this research — should give policymakers pause — and perhaps a new found sense of humility.

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Study: South American Glaciers In Historic Retreat

One of the more dramatic effects of global warming is shrinking glaciers around the globe. 10 to 20 percent of glacier ice in the European Alps, for example, has been lost in less than two decades, and half the volume of the mountain range’s glacier ice has melted away since 1850.

Thinning and melting rates in Alaskan glaciers more than doubled over the last decade, African glaciers have declined by 60 to 70 percent since the 1900s, and most Pacific glaciers are also receding. Summer ice coverage in the Arctic could disappear entirely within a decade, and Glacier National Park may not have any glaciers by 2030.

This isn’t just destructive to wildlife and ecosystems. Given their locations, glaciers can serve as crucial supplies of fresh water for various human populations — and as they shrink year after year, those supplies tighten.

The latest example comes from a new report by The Cryosphere, which documents the shrinkage of glaciers in the Andes mountain range of South America. The glaciers have shrunk by at least a third, and possibly as much as half, since the 1970s alone. And the worst loss has been seen in the smaller, lower altitude glaciers which supply fresh water for many of the continent’s residents, according to a round-up of the report by Reuters:

Climate change has shrunk Andean glaciers between 30 and 50% since the 1970s and could melt many of them away altogether in coming years, according to a study published on Tuesday in the journal Cryosphere.

Andean glaciers, a vital source of fresh water for tens of millions of South Americans, are retreating at their fastest rates in more than 300 years, according to the most comprehensive review of Andean ice loss so far.

The study included data on about half of all Andean glaciers in South America, and blamed the ice loss on an average temperature rise of 0.7 degree Celsius over the past 70 years. [...]

The researchers also warned that future warming could totally wipe out the smaller glaciers found at lower altitudes that store and release fresh water for downstream communities.

The plot above tracks the changes in surface area for the various glaciers in the Andes since the Little Ice Age in the mid-17th to early-18th centuries. The measurements prior to 1940 were put together from studies of debris associated with the glaciers, and reconstructed from aerial photographs after that point. The drop-off in the second half of the 20th Century is precipitous.

The Zongo Glacier (the red squares) managed to avoid the dramatic shrinkage of the other glaciers because it sits at a higher altitude. The lower altitude glaciers are more vulnerable to temperature shifts, and thus have seen the worst of the melting. They’re also the glaciers that supply fresh water for both the agriculture and consumption of large populations in the arid regions of Peru and Bolivia, serving as a buffer for those communities during the dry season from May/June to August/September.

As the glaciers recede, that buffer shrinks, leaving those water supplies ever more strained. Meanwhile, the tendency of global warming to drive more extreme weather patterns could exacerbate the severity of the dry season, dealing a double blow to the people of Peru and Bolivia.

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