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Aaron Schwartz

@aschwartz.bsky.social

3K followers 640 following 460 posts

MD-PhD professing at the University of Pennsylvania. Health, economics, and health economics.

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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · May 14

Eric Roberts and @joefigs.bsky.social led a groundbreaking new study on Medicaid and Medicare, out today in NEJM. I’m lucky to have been a part of it.

Medicare saves lives. But is it enough to save lives of the most vulnerable Americans? The study suggests no; Medicaid still matters. (1/11)

Loss of Subsidized Drug Coverage and Mortality among Medicare Beneficiaries | NEJM

A total of 14 million Medicare beneficiaries receive the Low-Income Subsidy (LIS), which reduces cost sharing in Medicare Part D. Losing the LIS may impede medication access and affect mortality. U...

www.nejm.org

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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 18h

Failed mandated scheduling effort.

Marjorie James Keenan @unenthusiast.com · 2d

In honour of spooky month, share a 4 word horror story that only someone in your profession would understand.

rm -rf ~/

hammancheez @hammancheez.bsky.social · 2d

"The chancellor approved it"

Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 3d

Scrubs captures the feelings best. Medical training has much absurdity. Dramas may get some factual details better, but will miss the forest for the trees (e.g. House feels nothing like medicine).

Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 3d

Wyle is great. I think the actors are dialing it up several notches above reality. But, since they are all coming in at similar high intensity, the shared reality coheres and the audience can buy it.

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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 3d

Beyond the medicine, I think the show really nails how docs think about the world. It’s definitely a show from doctors’ perspective.

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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 3d

They hire docs for the writing teams. When I was on an ICU rotation in residency, our attending had a side gig for a network tv medical show. We had a case of cold agglutinin disease (immune system shreds red blood cells in cold temps). “Good case. We could write that into the show,” they said.

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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 3d

Nice. I’ve enjoyed watching with my doctor spouse and guessing how the cases will evolve. Mostly we have found it to be very accurate.

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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 3d

Where does one find this?

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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 3d

And it’s true, his early death really did get in the way of him maximizing his Medicare benefits.

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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 3d

The mail and email we get for my father in-law, who has been dead for over a year, is really a thing to behold.

From his former health insurer and from his former landlord:

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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 3d

Not Ohtani coming from Japan to the Dodgers.

It's like the Dodgers announcing they are leaving LA to go to Japan.

Reposted by Aaron Schwartz

Jason Furman @jasonfurman.bsky.social · 3d

The other day a student asked me about the prevalence of insider trading in prediction markets. I now have an answer.

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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 4d

And also, yes, I share Atheen’s concern that none of my research is particularly impactful these days, and social science is wandering the wilderness for the time being.

Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 4d

Even when research studies are useless, devotion to research further the belief that careful consideration of observations is a useful way to approach decisions. The alternative approaches (power/violence, rhetoric/sophistry, identity/favoritism) are poison pills.

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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 4d

…there aren’t enough geniuses with free time to solve all our important problems with 100% high impact research output.

We need home runs, singles, and even screw ups to move things forward.

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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 4d

Because the stakes are so high in health, even small contributions can make a big difference.

The real reason a physician-investigator life is such a luxury is we get to make both clear contributions for specific patients and less certain contributions to populations…

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Reposted by Aaron Schwartz

Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 5d

The elimination of USAID is a moral atrocity and all involved made a choice to enable, and then lie about, ending the lives of some of the most vulnerable people in the world.

MAE SOT, Thailand (AP) - Mohammed Taher clutched the lifeless body of his 2-year-old son and wept. Ever since his family's food rations stopped arriving at their internment camp in Myanmar in April, the father had watched helplessly as his once-vibrant baby boy weakened, suffering from diarrhea and begging for food.
On May 21, exactly two weeks after Taher's little boy died, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio sat before Congress and declared: "No one has died" because of his government's decision to gut its foreign aid program. Rubio also insisted: "No children are dying on my watch."
That, Taher says, "is a lie."

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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 7d

…ALS patients with the mutation show 6x the T-cell reactivity. The abstract of that paper ends “These findings highlight the potential of therapeutic strategies [for ALS] aimed at enhancing
regulatory T cells” www.nature.com/articles/s41...

www.nature.com

Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 7d

Yentli inherited the c9orf72 mutation that causes ALS from her dad, Frank. Frank, a beloved public school educator, who died last year at 66.

14 years after c9orf72 was discovered as a cause ALS, last week, researchers discovered that T-cells are highly reactive to c9orf72 in ALS patients….

Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 7d

Here is Yentli, one of our MD-PhD students at Penn, speaking powerfully about the stakes here.

Regulatory T-cells could be a key to defeating the genetic mutation that killed her dad with ALS and threatens her life.

From a speech at her high school this week: www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 7d

It is possible that enhancing the activity of regulatory T-cells, could help treat these diseases or prevent the diseases from progressing.

See, for example, the new study on ALS, highlighting the possible role for treatments aimed at regulatory T cells www.nature.com/articles/s41...
(3/3)

Autoimmune response to C9orf72 protein in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis - Nature

An analysis of T cell responses in people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis shows that the C9orf72 antigen is a key target of autoimmune responses in the disease, and identifies C9orf72 epitopes that are recognized.

www.nature.com

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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 7d

The past few years have seen several compelling studies linking neurological diseases to infection and our immune responses. For example:

Dementia: Eyting et al, Nature 2025
Multiple sclerosis: Bjornevik et al, Science 2022
ALS: Michaelis et al, Nature (just this week!)
(2/3)

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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 7d

Today's Nobel Prize in Medicine went to the discoverers of regulatory T-cells. How could this discovery about our immune systems change the world?

Here is one possible way: leading to treatments for terrible neurological diseases. (1/3)

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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 9d

Ok you were right

Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 9d

Believe in the old man!

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Reposted by Aaron Schwartz

Mirya R. Holman @mirya.bsky.social · 10d

"Full-day kindergarten expansions were responsible for as much as 24 percent of the growth in employment of mothers with kindergartenaged children in this time frame."

AEA Journals @aeajournals.bsky.social · 10d

Forthcoming in AEJ: Economic Policy: "A Matter of Time? Measuring Effects of Public Schooling Expansions on Families" by Chloe R. Gibbs, Jocelyn Wikle, and Riley Wilson. www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

A Matter of Time? Measuring Effects of Public Schooling Expansions on Families

(Forthcoming Article) - We leverage pronounced changes in the availability of public schooling for young children— through duration expansions to the kindergarten day—to better understand how an impli...

www.aeaweb.org

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