Medicaid curbs for autistic kids nixed
COLUMBUS, Ohio, Aug. 5 (UPI) -- An intermediate appeals court said Ohio cannot adopt new eligibility rules that would eliminate or severely curtail Medicaid services for autistic children.
The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the U.S. District Court in Columbus, Ohio, was within its authority when it temporarily blocked Ohio from implementing new Medicaid rules that would have been effective July 1, 2008.
The state had argued the district court had exceeded its authority.
The suit directly affects about 60 families in central Ohio, but could have national effects because it's one of the first legal challenges to federal standards for funding autism services, one of the most frequently diagnosed developmental disabilities, The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch reported.
Medicaid is a U.S. health program for eligible individuals and families with low incomes and resources. It is jointly funded by the state and federal governments and is managed by the states.
Ohio is continuing to pay for the autism services, pending appeal. The services can run up to $60,000 a year per child, the Dispatch said.
A state Department of Job and Family Services spokesman said the agency, which oversees Medicaid, had no comment pending the case's final disposition.
The Parents League for Effective Autism Services, a group of families of autistic children, sued the state over the proposed changes.
State officials said the changes were needed so Ohio could comply with federal Medicaid regulations. Parents argued the rules violated their rights to Medicaid services.
The appeals court ruling dealt only with a temporary restraining order and not with the larger issue of what the court called "an ambiguous federal Medicaid provision."
Development-fertility link explored
PHILADELPHIA, Aug. 5 (UPI) -- As wealth increases in developing nations, fertility declines until a high level of economic development is reached, U.S. researchers said Wednesday.
The rise in an aging population globally, accompanied by a drop in birth rates, has led to socioeconomic concerns on matters such as workforce maintenance, University of Pennsylvania researchers reported in Nature. The related rise and fall led leaders in developed and developing countries to express concerns that population decreases would become irreplaceable.
However, Penn researcher Hans-Peter Kohler and other researchers said they found a J-shaped correlation between economic development and fertility, indicating a reverse was possible.
In their research, the team examined total fertility rate and the human development index in 24 countries over a 30-year span. Low and medium human development index levels showed a fertility decline, they reported. However, when human development index reaches advanced levels, as it has in the United States and the Netherlands, fertility slowly begins to rise, they said.
Galaxies of yore smaller, research shows
NEW HAVEN, Conn., Aug. 5 (UPI) -- Galaxies of today are bigger and denser than the most massive galaxies of the universe in its early days, U.S. astronomers said.
Recent observations of very distant massive galaxies -- located so far away that their light left them more than 10 billion years ago -- suggested that the galaxies were about five times smaller than similar galaxies of today, even though they contain roughly the same amount of stars, researchers from Yale University and Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne said in a news release issued by Yale.
However, they said their findings leave theorists with a puzzle: How did today's galaxies evolve?
Theoretical models of galaxy evolution can't explain how today's galaxies could have evolved from their more compact predecessors -- unless the masses of early galaxies were overestimated, researchers said.
Van Dokkum said he and his colleagues took an independent measurement of the mass of one of the smaller, outer galaxies, debunking a theory that an increase in the size of galaxies, along with an increase in mass by galaxies merging, would eventually result in today's larger galaxies.
Rare surgery transplants reversed heart
MILWAUKEE, Aug. 5 (UPI) -- A rare U.S. heart transplant replaced the defective heart on the right side of a man's chest with a re-engineered normal left-side donor heart, doctors said.
The patient, Jack Eigel, 53, of Wauwatosa, Wis., was born with the congenital condition called situs inversus, in which the major visceral organs are reversed or mirrored from their normal positions.
While the condition is usually benign, Eigel needed a transplant because his heart was failing for reasons unrelated to the condition, doctors said.
The six-hour operation at the University of Wisconsin Hospital in Madison is believed to be Wisconsin's first, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported. The procedure is probably done only once every four or five years in the United States, the newspaper said.
Situs inversus is found in about one in 10,000 people.
Eigel was in good condition Wednesday afternoon, the hospital told United Press International.
"It definitely was a very weird experience to open his chest and see everything on the wrong side," transplant surgeon Niloo Edwards told the Journal Sentinel.
"Everything was not just reversed, but it was mirrored in the opposite direction," he said.
Edwards, the university's chairman of cardiothoracic surgery, compared the operation with attempting to put the inside of a car with a left-side steering wheel into the shell of a car with a right-side steering wheel.
Another way of describing it was like trying to write your name on a piece of paper while watching the reflection in a mirror, he said.
Eigel told the newspaper before the operation that in grade school, teachers would correct him when he put his hand over the right side of his chest while saying the Pledge of Allegiance.
Eventually, he just did the pledge like the other kids.
"It's just a condition," he said. "It's kind of like being left-handed."
