We reported in a recent In Essence item about a Health Affairs article whose authors found that when people learned through genetic testing that they were likely to develop a debilitating disease (the authors looked at Alzheimer’s), they were more likely to enroll in long-term care insurance plans.  The spread of genetic testing, the authors said, will likely increase the number of high-risk enrollees and could undermine the financial foundation of the plans.

The passage of health-care reform, however, may alter this distressing equation.  Buried within the 2,000 pages of legislation that President Barack Obama signed into law on March 23 is the little-discussed Community Living Assistance Services and Supports (CLASS) Act, which lays out a national program for long-term care insurance.  According to the Congressional Budget Office, under the CLASS Act, workers will automatically make monthly contributions of around $65 to a national plan (though they can opt out), and become eligible to receive benefits after five years of roughly $75 a day or more depending on need.  Such sums aren’t sufficient to completely cover nursing home care, but they should pay for a big part of the cost of various home care services. Ideally, a much greater number of Americans will buy insurance (fewer than 10 percent over 50 do now), spreading risk, and lowering costs.

Reached by phone, Donald H. Taylor, Jr., an assistant professor of public policy at Duke

“Redesigned” is not a strong enough word to characterize the new WQ Web site. We have taken a green shoot from the print magazine with the idea that we will grow something new and different on the Web--but not so different that we burden you with more of the opinion-mongering and cute tidbits that are so common online. Here, as in print, the WQ’s editors will seek out ideas and research from often obscure corners of the intellectual world and bring them into the public conversation. Our new blog gives us the opportunity to take a spacious view of our core mission. So in addition to essays and reviews from the ink-and-paper WQ you will find here interviews with authors, follow-ups on pieces that have appeared in the magazine, and Web-only notes by the editors on books and ideas. Also on tap are historical videos, podcasts, and exclusive Web essays, a feature we inaugurate with an article by the eminent historian David Landes. Have a look around, and help us grow the new site by letting us know what you think.

Journalist Sam Rich was one of the first to report back from on the ground in Sauri, Kenya, site of economist Jeffrey Sachs’s experiment with “shock aid.” In a piece published in our Spring 2007 issue, Rich cast a skeptical eye upon Sachs’s Millennium Village Project (MVP) and the millions of dollars it was pouring into the village—roughly $100 per inhabitant for five years. At the time, two years since the advent of the project, small but unmistakable gains were already emerging: Malaria infection rates had dropped from 40 to 20 percent and 50 new taps spouted purified drinking water. Sauri’s once sickly schoolchildren had recently placed first in a regional sports competition.

Despite such improvements, a giant question mark hovered over Sachs’s project: Could these efforts in Sauri be “scaled-up” to address poverty across the country and perhaps the continent?

Sauri’s five years of intense aid are now winding down and that question has yet to be answered. A recent New York Times piece by East Africa bureau chief Jeffrey Gettleman reports that Sachs and his team will publish a major review later this year. Many aid watchers, such as Michael Clemens at the Center for Global Development, have called for a rigorous empirical study comparing of Sauri and the other Millennium Villages with villages that haven’t received such intense aid.

But some doubt whether such a review would be useful. Chris Blattman, a