Skeletal muscle perfusion during exercise is impaired in heart failure, but the underlying mechanisms are poorly understood. One possibility is that sympathetic vasoconstriction is enhanced in exercising muscle in heart failure as a result of impaired counterregulatory mechanisms that normally act to attenuate vasoconstrictor responses. In healthy animals, sympathetic vasoconstriction in contra...

In 1996, a newly elected government in the Province of Ontario, Canada, introduced a managed competition environment into the home care sector through the establishment of a competitive contracting process for home care services. Through 65 in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted between November 1999 and January 2001, we trace the implementation of this competitive contracting policy wi...

With the formation of European Monetary Union (EMU) in 1999, the eleven countries that adopted the Euro began to conduct a single monetary policy oriented towards unionwide objectives. The objective of this paper is to construct a small model of the Euro area, which may serve as a laboratory for evaluating the performance of alternative monetary policy strategies for the Euro area in the vein o...

BACKGROUND In a demand oriented health care system based on managed competition, health insurers have incentives to become prudent buyers of care on behalf of their enrolees. They are allowed to selectively contract care providers. This is supposed to stimulate competition between care providers and both increase the quality of care and contain costs in the health care system. However, health i...

OBJECTIVES The objective of the study was to investigate the association between predialysis chronic kidney disease and contracting pneumonia in Taiwan. METHODS We employed a population-based, retrospective cohort design using the database of the Taiwan National Health Insurance (NHI) Program. There were 18807 subjects aged 20-84 years who were newly diagnosed with predialysis chronic kidney ...

BACKGROUND The case of contracting out government health services to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) has been weak for maternal, newborn, and child health (MNCH) services, with documented gains being mainly in curative services. We present an in-depth assessment of the comparative advantages of contracting out on MNCH access, quality, and equity, using a case study from Pakistan. METHOD...

This study explores the critical factors influencing the energy service contracting market in Turkey. Fuzzy cognitive mapping that allows dynamic modeling of the behavior of uncertain and complex systems was used to model the energy service contracting system. Qualitative simulations were performed in order to predict changes in the system and to observe whether an equilibrium state is reached....