Outpatient prescription drugs are not a covered benefit under Medicare. There have been proposals in the past to expand Medicare benefits to include drug coverage, and current discussions dealing with "modernizing" the Medicare benefit package have raised the issue again. Using data from the 1995 Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS), we describe the sources and extent of drug coverage amo...

there are fragmentations in iran’s health insurance system. multiple health insurance funds exist, without adequate provisions for transfer or redistribution of cross subsidy among them. multiple risk pools, including several private secondary insurance schemes, have resulted in a tiered health insurance system with inequitable benefit packages for different segments of the population. also fra...

One benefit of a computational grid is the ability to run high-performance applications over distributed resources simply and securely. We demonstrated this benefit with an experiment in which we studied the protein-folding process with the CHARMM molecular simulation package over a grid managed by Legion, a grid operating system. High-performance applications can take advantage of grid resourc...

We applied a decision tool for rationing choices, with a predetermined budget of about 11 US dollars per household per year, to identify priorities of poor people regarding health insurance benefits in India in late 2005. A total of 302 individuals, organized in 24 groups, participated from a number of villages and neighborhoods of towns in Karnataka and Maharashtra. Many individuals were illit...

Fatode is a fortran library for the integration of ordinary differential equations with direct and adjoint sensitivity analysis capabilities. The paper describes the capabilities, implementation, code organization, and usage of this package. Fatode implements four families of methods – explicit Runge-Kutta for nonstiff problems and fully implicit Runge-Kutta, singly diagonally implicit Runge-Ku...

I ncreasing product variety through the use of alternate package sizes is a commonly observed mechanism in the grocery industry. Under such a scheme, however, the response to pricing decisions for each of the different package sizes is affected by how customers make demand choices. We build a demand model in which customers react smart to retail promotions through stockpiling and package size s...

The majority of Medicare beneficiaries supplement the basic Medicare benefit package with additional insurance. This article reviews the literature on Medicare supplemental insurance. Supplemental insurance plays a significant role in protecting Medicare beneficiaries from financial risk. The two major sources of coverage for beneficiaries--former employers and individual purchase--differ in be...

Most employers who provide health insurance to employees subsidize their premiums and provide a comprehensive benefit package. Before the Affordable Care Act, people who lacked health insurance through a job and purchased it on their own paid the full cost of their plans, which often came with skimpy benefit packages and high deductibles. Findings from the Commonwealth Fund Affordable Care Act ...

This study is about the earnings-replacement rate of the old-age benefit for the average worker in manufacturing who had average earnings throughout his career. It updates previously published data for earlier years and compares the replacement rate of the combined social security and private pension benefits for selected countries, in an attempt to show what a more complete benefit package mig...

UNLABELLED The genomes of influenza A and B viruses comprise eight segmented, single-stranded, negative-sense viral RNAs (vRNAs). Although segmentation of the virus genome complicates the packaging of infectious progeny into virions, it provides an evolutionary benefit in that it allows viruses to exchange vRNAs with other strains. Influenza A viruses are believed to package their eight differe...