Provincial experiments aim to lower public drug plan costs

Can a Public Insurance Plan Increase Competition and Lower the Costs of Health Reform?

Senator Barack Obama has proposed having a public plan available to those seeking coverage in a purchasing arrangement, such as the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan. Senators Hillary Clinton and John Edwards had similar proposals. In the academic world, Jacob Hacker of Yale University has articulated the same proposal in his Health Care for Americans plan.2 Likewise, the reform approach w...

Use and reimbursement costs of smoking cessation medication under the Quebec public drug insurance plan.

OBJECTIVES Since October 2000, the nicotine patch, nicotine gum and bupropion have been reimbursed under Quebec's public drug insurance plan. The objective of this study is to describe use of these medications between October 2000 and December 2004 by smokers covered by the public plan, as well as the costs of reimbursing these medications. METHODS Data from the Régie de l'assurance maladie d...

What it costs to implement a plan: plan-level and task-level contributions to switch costs.

Four experiments were conducted to identify the costs of implementing a plan in the task span procedure, which requires subjects to retrieve the task to perform on the current target from a list of planned tasks in memory. Experiment 1 compared switch costs in the task span procedure with switch costs in the explicit task-cuing procedure, which presented cues indicating the task to perform on e...

Beyond the Public Plan: A Pathway to Contain Costs and Transform the Delivery System

Patients' willingness to discuss trade-offs to lower their out-of-pocket drug costs.

reducing sodium intake and increasing potassium intake. There are various ways to improve intakes of minerals in the population. Adherence to dietary guidelines, with ample fruit and vegetables, whole grains, and lowfat dairy products, should be promoted. Food companies can help by promoting the availability of healthier foods and also by improving the type and content of minerals in their prod...