Trends in Medicaid payments and utilization from 1975 through 1989 are examined in this article. Medicaid payments grew significantly over the period 1975-89, but the rate of growth was uneven. Total payments grew rapidly from 1975 through 1981, but the rate of growth slowed considerably from 1982 through 1988. Recent data suggests that there may be a new discontinuity in the series; payments i...

Feds are trying hard to plug the numerous holes in the healthcare dam. The Obama administration announced on June 25, 2014 that a new anti-fraud program in Medicare doubled the amount of improper payments it identified or prevented this year.3 The Fraud Prevention System at CMS recovered or prevented more than $210 million of improper payments in its second year, the agency told Congress in a r...

An agricultural policy option where individual producers’ support prices increase with the proportion of land set-aside is evaluated. A theoretical framework is presented and a stochastic simulation model is developed to generate estimates of the impacts of the policy on aggregate and regional distribution of government payments and farm-level income. Results indicate that significant land idli...

BACKGROUND Medicaid has become the largest payer of substance use disorder treatment and may enhance access to quality care and reduce disparities. We tested whether treatment programs' acceptance of Medicaid payments was associated with reduced disparities between Mexican Americans and non-Latino Whites. METHODS We analyzed client and program data from 122 publicly funded treatment programs ...

> Under the new ValueBased Purchasing program, hospitals will receive incentive payments based on how well they perform on 12 clinical process measures and nine patient experience measures or on how much their performance improves relative to a baseline performance period. > It is likely that as many hospitals will be penalized with payment reductions under the program as will benefit from paym...

BACKGROUND The main aim of this study was to evaluate the achievements of some important goals of Iran's urban family physician plan. This plan was implemented when the country experienced economic instability. We examine whether an economic crisis affects the efficacy of a healthcare program. METHODS We used the household income and expenditures survey data for 2011 (before program implement...

This paper develops a model to examine the impacts of uncertainty about crop production and irreversibility of program participation on determining land rental payments and least-cost land retirement targeting in the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program. Results show that under risk aversion only, the marginal cost of abatement and the average land rental payment are less than those under r...

— We develop a conceptual framework elucidating the main determinants of the impact of Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) and Payments for Environmental Services (PES) programs. Using a simple multi-agent model and evaluations of existing programs, we show that (1) the share of the population who would meet the program’s conditions in the absence of payments is a powerful predictor of program effi...

We consider the feasibility problem in d-dimensional orthogonal packing (d ≥ 2), called Orthogonal Packing Problem (OPP): given a set of ddimensional rectangular items, decide whether all of them can be orthogonally packed in the given rectangular container without item rotation. We review two kinds of 1D relaxations of OPP. The first kind is non-preemptive cumulative-resource scheduling, equiv...

PURPOSE To determine whether nifedipine, an L-type calcium channel blocker, alters choroidal blood flow (ChBF) regulation during isometric exercise in healthy subjects. METHODS The study was carried out in a randomized, placebo-controlled, double-masked, two-way crossover design. Fifteen healthy male subjects were randomly assigned to receive either placebo or nifedipine on two different stud...