Chemokine production is known to be increased during acute renal allograft rejection. In this study we showed that the graft tissues also respond by increasing their potential to bind chemokines, a process that is vital for effective chemokine presentation and leukocyte recruitment.

Medicare adjusts payments to Medicare Advantage (MA) insurers using risk scores that summarize the relationship between fee-for-service (FFS) Medicare spending and beneficiaries’ demographic characteristics and documented health conditions. Research shows that MA insurers have increasingly documented conditions more thoroughly than traditional Medicare—resulting in higher payments to insurers—but little is known about what factors contribute to diverging risk scores. We apportion that divergence between market-wide increases and increases that vary with length of MA enrollment. We also examine whether effects vary across plan types and whether the enrollment duration effect is contingent upon remaining with the same insurer. Using Medicare administrative data from 2008 to 2013, we employ a difference-in-differences model to compare the growth in risk scores of Medicare beneficiaries who switch from FFS to MA to that of beneficiaries who remain in FFS. We find that the effect of MA enrollment on risk scores increased from 5% in 2009 to 8% in 2012 and that continuous enrollment in MA was associated with an additional 1.2% increase per year, regardless of continuous enrollment with an insurer. Thus, even among those who switched to MA in 2009, enrollment duration comprised less than one-third of the coding intensity difference in 2012. We also find that risk scores grew faster in areas with greater MA penetration and among Health Maintenance Organization enrollees. Overall, our findings suggest that market-wide factors contributed most to the increasing divergence between FFS and MA risk scores.

We compare numbers of hospital admissions for intravenous drug using (IVDU) HIV patients and other HIV patients in acute-care facilities in New York State. Data consist of routinely collected hospital-discharge reports from New York's Statewide Planning and Research Cooperative System, linked into longitudinal case histories. Because recognition of an IVDU depends on an opioid diagnosis on any record in the case history, the observed distribution of the number of admissions per case for recognized IVDU's is biased towards greater numbers of admissions. We develop and apply a model to overcome this biasing. Our findings reveal that the mean numbers of admissions for the two groups differ significantly, but less so than without recognition of the length biasing.

This article compares Disability Insurance (DI) savings to those projected in the Congressional Budget Office cost estimate accompanying the Ticket to Work (TTW) authorizing legislation. Enacted with the goal of promoting employment among DI beneficiaries, TTW savings were close to predicted savings, but economic conditions reduced the impact. These findings suggest vocational rehabilitation policies need to incorporate strategies to address economic downtowns if they are to promote long‐term independence. This article highlights some of the challenges inherent to evaluations conducted without an experimental research design, while illustrating the potential of ex post analyses to assess whether expected savings materialize.