The Affordable Care Act prohibited insurers from denying or limiting cover­age for children under the age of 19 in 2010. In response, some insurers ceased to offer coverage to children in need of individual health insurance, known as a "child-only" pol­icy. This issue brief examines new state legislative and regulatory action to promote the availability of child-only policies in response to thi...

This paper develops and tests a theory of insurers' choice of the mix of equity and liabilities. The role of equity in insurance markets (and in our model) is to back insurers' promises to pay claims when there is aggregate uncertainty, or dependence among risks. Depending on the nature of this aggregate uncertainty, the equity held by rms in a competitive insurance market may increase with ris...

The Affordable Care Act includes numerous consumer protections that took effect on September 23, 2010. This issue brief examines new state action on a subset of these "early market reforms." The analysis finds that 49 states and the District of Columbia have passed new legislation, issued a new regulation, issued new subregulatory guidance, or are actively reviewing insurer policy forms for com...

Pollen tubes of higher plants grow very rapidly until they reach the ovules to fertilize female gametes. This growth process is energy demanding, however, nutrition strategies pollen are largely unexplored. Here, we studied function sucrose transporters and invertases during germination tube growth. RT-PCR analyses, reporter lines knockout mutants were used study gene expression protein in poll...

abstract        background and objective: staphylococcus aureus is the most common and important infectious agent. this bacterium can enter the bloodstream and cause some complications in the intensive care unit (icu).this organism can frequently be found in the nose and transmitted by the carriers. this study aimed to determine the efficiency of eradicating s. aureus from the nose of icu perso...

Apolipoprotein-ε4 (APOE-ε4) is a major genetic risk factor for cognitive decline, Alzheimer's disease (AD) and early mortality. An accelerated rate of biological aging could contribute to this increased risk. Here, we determined whether APOE-ε4 status impacts leukocyte telomere length (TL) and the rate of cellular senescence in healthy mid-life women and, further, whether hormone replacement th...

Destruction of bone tissue due to disease and inefficient bone healing after traumatic injury may be addressed by tissue engineering techniques. Growth factor, cytokine protein, and gene therapies will be developed, which, in conjunction with suitable carriers, will regenerate missing bone or help in cases of defective healing.

We demonstrate the self-assembled formation of concentric quantum double rings with high uniformity and excellent rotational symmetry using the droplet epitaxy technique. Varying the growth process conditions can control each ring's size. Photoluminescence spectra emitted from an individual quantum ring complex show peculiar quantized levels that are specified by the carriers' orbital trajector...