The federal government could save taxpayers over $5 billion in the first year by changing the way the government assigns Part D plans for Medicare beneficiaries eligible for low-income subsidies.

Either male hurricanes need to break through that glass ceiling of really dangerous storms, or we underestimate storms with female-sounding names and that puts more people in peril, or business scholars have taken causalation (correlation does not equal causation takes too long to write over and over) to a new level.

An analysis of more than six decades of death rates from U.S. hurricanes shows that severe hurricanes with a more feminine name resulted in a greater death toll, simply because a storm with a feminine name is seen as less foreboding than one with a more masculine name. As a result, people in the path of these severe storms may take fewer protective measures, leaving them more vulnerable to harm.

There is a joke among abortion proponents that if men could get pregnant, abortion clinics would be more common on city streets than Starbucks coffee shops. If that is so, the best way to get something done about insects in developing nations would be to send environmentalists there.  Sitting in cozy western offices, it is easy to rail against DDT and genetic modification but the first time a Union of Concerned Scientists fundraiser gets dengue fever they would be all for science solutions to mosquitoes.

In a letter to the Annals of Internal Medicine, a group of nutritionists object to all of the studies finding supplements are well-marketed but unnecessary costs for most Americans.  

Their rebuttal: they don't harm anyone, they are relatively cheap and science can't prove they don't work. 

Hardly a great endorsement, but the nutritionists from the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University and three other institutions can't really argue for the benefits of supplements, so they instead argue that the case is not 'closed', as an editorial in the same publication last year argued. 

It sounds positively un-American to have government picking winner and losers in the drug marketplace, but the writing is on the wall for our health future: taxpayer-funded Medicare is going to be the economic driver in medical decision-making and policy sooner or later.

And if all eye doctors were told to prescribe the less expensive of two drugs to treat two common eye diseases in older adults, it could save taxpayers $18 billion over a 10-year period, say scholars in a new paper. And the rest of the U.S. health care system could save $29 billion also, according to the findings of a team led by David Hutton, assistant professor of health management and policy at the University of Michigan.

A new study in
Nature Climate Change challenges the assumption in climate models that climate is the primary driver of how quickly organic matter decomposes in different regions. 

A long-term analysis conducted across several sites in the eastern United States found that local factors — from levels of fungal colonization to the specific physical locations of the wood — play a far greater role than climate in wood decomposition rates and the subsequent impacts on regional carbon cycling.

Because decomposition of organic matter strongly influences the storage of carbon, or its release into the atmosphere, it is a major factor in potential changes to the climate.