Health at Any Price?

Value-based insurance design: more health at any price.

When everyone is required to pay the same out-of-pocket amount for health care services regardless of clinical indication, there is evidence of underuse of high-value services and overuse of interventions of no or marginal clinical benefit. Unlike most current health plan designs, value-based insurance design (V-BID) acknowledges heterogeneity of clinical interventions and patient characteristi...

Screening at any cost?

Can we increase screening participation, and if so, at what cost? These were the questions I asked myself while reading the article “Effect of provider and patient reminders, deployment of nurse practitioners, and financial incentives on cervical and breast cancer screening rates,” which appears on page e282 of this issue.1 Kaczorowski et al present the results of a large concerted effort that ...

Unreconstructible at Any Radius

Modeling pattern data series with cellular automata fails for a wide range of deterministic nonlinear spatial processes. If the latter have finite spatially-local memory, reconstructed cellular automata with infinite radius may be required. In some cases, even this is not adequate: an irreducible stochasticity remains on the shortest time scales. The underlying problem is illustrated and quanti...

Thailand: health care for all, at a price.

ED cognition: any decision by anyone at any time.

The ability of an emergency department (ED) to meet the needs of its patients depends largely on the resources available. Relevant resources include nurses, physicians, paramedics, specialty backup, care spaces, inpatient bed base, space, equipment, and supplies. All are important to ED function; however, one resource that is seldom considered is cognition, the cognitive capacity of ED staff. A...