Currently, relative value units for practice expense are determined under the Medicare fee schedule (MFS) using historical physician charges. This seems inconsistent with the goal of a resource-based fee schedule. A specialty resource-based method of determining practice expense payments is presented and simulated here. The method assumes that, for each service, the payment for practice expense...

BACKGROUND As healthcare spending continues to increase, medical insurance is now under great pressure of growing economic burden. To control the excessive growth of medical expenditure, change of medical payment system was clearly put forward in China's new healthcare reform. With this end, Tianjin, a large city in North China, is now exploring to replace traditional fee-for-service (FFS) with...

We study the impact of a recent curriculum reform introducing mandatory economic education in higher-track secondary schools Southwest Germany. The provides opportunity to leverage exogenous variation exposure relative previous cohort not affected by reform. One year after mandate, we observe positive treatment effects on test scores measuring cognitive elements competence only for students wit...