Matching taxpayer funding to population health needs.

Matching taxpayer funding to population health needs: not so simple.

Sinking SCHIP: A First Step toward Stopping the Growth of Government Health Programs

Federal lawmakers are considering legislation that could result in millions more middleincome families obtaining health insurance from government. Unfortunately, the debate over expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program is divorced from the reality of who truly needs assistance and the forces that are making health insurance increasingly unaffordable. SCHIP and its larger sibli...

A political attack on peer review.

R esearch aimed at finding effective treatments for mental illness is self-evidently a good idea. Unfortunately, this noble aim is now being used in a disingenuous attempt to reduce the funding of basic neuroscience research by the US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). It may seem obvious to neuroscientists that before we can learn how to fix the brain, we need to know how it works, bu...

Multi-Agent Simulation of Taxpayer Reporting Compliance

This paper describes the development of the Individual Reporting Compliance Model (IRCM), an agent-based model for simulating tax reporting compliance in a community of 85,000 U.S. taxpayers. IRCM design features include detailed tax return characteristics, behavioral components (e.g., taxpayer learning), formal and informal social networks, and tax agency enforcement measures (e.g., audits and...

Funding of Northern Territory public hospitals.

The Northern Territory is Australia's third largest jurisdiction by land mass but it is the smallest by population. By proportion it accommodates the largest number of Aboriginal people who suffer the greatest burden of disease with high morbidity, mortality, admission rates and lengths of stay. Output based funding by DRG is based on the "typical" Australian population which is not that of the...