Malpractice liability, along with medical technology and payment system distortions, regularly figures among the most-cited reasons for escalating health-care spending in the United States. On the one hand, Harvard economist Amitabh Chandra conservatively estimates that upwards of $60 billion, or 3 percent of total health care costs ($1.8 trillion), is spent annually as a result of direct litigation and indi­rect defensive medicine costs. On the other hand, tort reform advocates place the figure at $200 billion by extrapolating, to the entire U.S. population, the results of research conducted by Stanford professor Dan Kessler and Mark McClellan. Their 1996 study shows that tort reforms reduced provider liability costs for Medicare heart patients by 5 to 9 percent.

At the heart of these debates is the following question. Does medical malpractice liability achieve its dual goal of compensating victims of medical injuries and deterring medical errors, or does it merely encourage wasteful defensive medicine without improving patient health? Despite considerable empiri­cal research, there is little evidence that malpractice litigation deters medical negligence. The evidence is much stronger—though still hotly debated—that malpractice fears actually encourage physicians to engage in defensive medicine.

The newest release in the Asia health Policy Program working paper series, AHPP working paper #13 by Brian Chen, explores whether malpractice pressures affect physician behavior, patient health, and health care costs in Asia. Studying physicians’ response to legal changes in Taiwan, he finds that greater malpractice liability may, under certain circumstances, prompt physicians to perform more services without necessarily improving patient health.

Dr. Chen investigates how physicians’ test-ordering behavior and propensity to perform cesarean sections were affected first by a series of court rulings in Taiwan that increased physicians’ liability risks, and then by a subsequent amendment to the law that reversed the courts’ rulings. He finds that physicians faced with higher malpractice pressure increased laboratory tests as expected but unexpectedly reduced cesarean sections. The reduction in cesarean deliveries may be due to the fact that liability risks were more closely aligned with physicians’ standard of care after the court rulings. After the law was amended to negate the court decisions, physicians reversed their previous behavior, reducing laboratory tests and increasing cesarean deliveries. This pattern of behavior strongly suggests that physicians in Taiwan practice defensive medicine.

Xueguang Zhou: Details about the school attacks remain to be sorted out — whether they are isolated or copycat acts; whether they are triggered by mental illness or based on some malicious motives. But one thing is clear: these incidents reflect widespread and rapidly rising social anxieties, frustrations and tensions in the Chinese society today.

Thirteen fellows, including three first-time Stanton Nuclear Security Fellows, will be in residence at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) during the 2010-2011 academic year.

Fellows and their research topics include:

• Alexander Betts, a post-doc from Oxford University. "Global Migration Governance: Multiple and Contested Institutions."
• Edward Blandford, a post-doc from the University of California at Berkeley. "Scaling of Hierarchical Engineered Systems."
• David Blum, a Stanford pre-doctoral candidate. "Probabilistic Early Warning Systems for National Security Crises."
• John Downer, a post-doc from the London School of Economics. "Administering Aircraft: The Security Implications of Technological Ecosystems." Zukerman Fellow.
• Matthias Englert, post-doc, CISAC. "Managing the Proliferations Risks of Gas Centrifuges-Analysis in View of Possible Solutions."
• Katherine D. Marvel, post-doc, CISAC. "Understanding the Regional Consequences of Global Climate Change" and "Game Changers for Nuclear Energy."
• Aila Matanock, a Stanford pre-doctoral candidate. "Reformed or Reconfigured? Explaining why Militant Groups Participate in Elections."
• Brenna M. Powell, pre-doc from Harvard. "Normalizing Security after Conflict: Jobs for the Boys and Justice for the Hoods."
• Jan M. Stupl, post-doc, CISAC. "Controlling the Spread of Ballistic Missiles."
• Michael Sulmeyer, D.Phil candidate, Oxford University; law student, Stanford Law School; teaching assistant for CISAC Honors Program. "Weapons under Fire: Terminating Major Weapons Contracts for the U.S. Military."

Stanton Nuclear Security Fellows and their research areas include:

• Anne Harrington de Santana, a post-doc from the University of Chicago. "The Fetishism of Force: Nuclear Weapons as a Currency of Power."
• Gaurav Kampani, a Cornell pre-doctoral candidate. "The Weaponization Paradox: Why some Emerging Nuclear Weapons Powers Delay Building Operational Forces."
• Riqiang Wu, a pre-doc from Tsinghua University in China. "How to Establish and Maintain an Asymmetric Deterrence: China-U.S. Strategic Relations."

The New York-based Korea Society and Stanford University's Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center launched the nonpartisan "New Beginnings" policy study group on January 10, 2008, to offer recommendations on how U.S. policymakers could expand and strengthen the alliance between the United States and the Republic of Korea (ROK, or South Korea). Composed of former senior U.S. government officials, scholars, and other American experts on U.S.-Korean relations, the New Beginnings project team premised its efforts on the belief that the inauguration of a new South Korean president in February 2008 and a new American president in January 2009 would provide a special opportunity for the two countries to increase mutual understanding and transform the alliance into a global partnership. In a coincidence occurring only once every twenty years, the two new presidents' terms of office would overlap for a full four years. Moreover, the alliance needed renewal and revitalization after years of strain and tension that arose from divergent worldviews of progressive governments in Seoul and a conservative administration in Washington.

Since its establishment, the New Beginnings policy study group has issued a report to the U.S. administration each year. New Beginnings' reports and recommendations reflect insights gained from group conferences as well as individual members' continuing engagement with U.S.-Korean affairs.

The Stanford Humanities Center and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) are pleased to announce that four international scholars have been chosen to come to Stanford in 2010-11 as part of a jointly sponsored international program entering its second year. Nominated by Stanford departments and research centers, the international scholars will be on campus for four-week residencies. They will have offices at the Humanities Center and will be affiliated with their nominating unit, the Humanities Center, and FSI.

A major purpose of the residencies is to bring high-profile international scholars into the intellectual life of the university, targeting scholars whose research and writing engage with the missions of both the Humanities Center and FSI.

The following four scholars have been selected for the upcoming academic year.

• Anies Baswedan, currently President of Paramadina University in Jakarta, is a leading intellectual figure in Indonesia. In 2008, the editors of Foreign Policy named him one of the world's "top 100 public intellectuals." As an advisor to the Indonesian government, he is a leading proponent of democracy and transparency in Indonesia, a creative thinker about Islam and democracy, as well as a charismatic leader in the educational field. He was nominated by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies.
• Stephane Dudoignon is a political scientist/senior research fellow at the EHESS in Paris. He is one of the world's leading scholars of Muslim politics and societies from the Caucasus to Central Asia. He is the author of pioneering work on Muslim movements, including the historical study of Sufi networks from the Volga River to China, Muslim intellectuals' debates about gender, and modern Sunni revivalist movements in Eastern Iran. While on campus, he will give lectures on Islam in Eurasia and Iran, among other things. He was nominated by CREEES, the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.
• Monica Quijada is a high-profile public intellectual and historian of Spain and Latin America at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC) in Madrid. Her engagement with the UN in Argentina (working with refugees) and her directorship of the investigation carried out in the late 1990s regarding Nazi activities during the Second World War and in post-war Argentina shows her commitment to the public space. She has written extensively on dictatorship, populism, and war and their effect on the public sphere in Argentina and Spain as well as on the relationship between nineteenth-century Latin American states and their indigenous populations. She was nominated by the History Department and the Center for Latin American Studies.
• Patrick Wolfe is a historian at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. He is a premier historian of settler colonialism, currently working on a comparative transnational history of settler-colonial discourses of race in Australia, Brazil, the United States, and Israel/Palestine. While at Stanford, he will give lectures based on his core work on Australia and also on his forthcoming book Settler Colonialism and the American West, 1865-1904 (Princeton University Press). He was nominated by the Bill Lane Center for the American West.

While at Stanford, the scholars will offer informal seminars and public lectures and will also be available for consultations with interested faculty and students. For additional information, please contact Marie-Pierre Ulloa, mpulloa@stanford.edu.