In the Medicare Advantage (MA) market, private health insurers compete to offer plans with the most attractive premium and benefit package. Medicare provides a subsidy, based on a \benchmark payment rate", for each Medicare beneficiary a plan enrolls. We investigate how this subsidy, the primary policy lever in the market, affects the equilibrium premiums and benefits of MA plans. We exploit va...

This article addresses a new initiative of the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) to contract on a group basis with: employer self-insurance plans, unions, group health insurance companies, and Taft-Hartley Health and Welfare Funds for groups of Medicare beneficiaries. under this new concept, Medicare beneficiaries may elect in the future to obtain Medicare coverage through their group...

In October 2005, the Health Industry Forum sponsored a one-day meeting, “Promoting Appropriate Utilization in an Era of Increasing Patient Cost Sharing: Early Experience and Future Benefit Design Strategies.” This meeting brought together representatives from health plans, pharmaceutical firms, consumer groups, employers and academic researchers to debate the potential benefits and risks of con...

fasting is a form of islamic worship to approach god.  there is a direct relationship between fasting, abstaining from eating and drinking, and an individual’s health as well as his ill-health. therefore, it is of utmost importance in the islamic perspective to weigh the spiritual benefits achieved through fasting against its probable harmfulness to an individual’s health. regarding fasting, th...

C urrent discussions of the future of Medicare include proposals to increase the enrollment of beneficiaries in private health insurance plans. These proposals would provide incentives for beneficiaries to join private plans, rely on more loosely structured health plans such as preferred provider organizations (PPOs), change the way health plans are paid, and in some cases create competition be...

: With the fast development of the E-commerce, it becomes critical to set up an E-commerce Evaluation criteria system. Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process is a new multi-criteria evaluation method evolved from Saaty’s AHP. This paper aimed to find out the key factors that affect success in E-commerce using fuzzy AHP, and give an evaluation method for E-commerce in order to help researches and mana...

The complex Swift-Hohenberg equation models pattern formation arising from an oscillatory instability with a finite wave number at onset and finds applications in lasers, optical parametric oscillators, and photorefractive oscillators. We show that with real coefficients this equation exhibits two classes of localized states: localized in amplitude only or localized in both amplitude and phase....

University scientific research ability is an important indicator to express the strength of universities. In this paper, the evaluation of university scientific research ability is investigated based on the output of sci-tech papers. Four university alliances from North America, UK, Australia, and China, are selected as the case study of the university scientific research evaluation. Data comin...

Article history: Received 18 September 2014 Available online 4 November 2014 MSC: 49A50 49J45 58E12