The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) set limits on insurers' overhead, mandating a medical loss ratio (MLR) of at least 80 percent in the individual and small-group markets and 85 percent in the large-group market starting in 2011. In implementing the law, the Obama administration introduced new rules that changed (and inflated) how insurers calculate MLRs, distorting time trend...

Women Social Security Beneficiaries Aged 62 or Older, 196~85* During the past half century, the number of women in the labor force has increased at a substantially higher rate than the number of working age women (table 1). In 1930, 10 million women workers represented only 24 percent of all women and 22 percent of the total labor force. By 1955, the number of women workers had doubled and wome...

A review of Helicobacter pylori in the Middle East is presented. Prevalence studies have been performed in asymptomatic population groups from Algeria, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. These showed that the prevalence of H. pylori is similar to that of the developing countries of the world with a high level of infection in childhood (40 to 70 percent), which increases with age to 85 to 90 perce...

Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) has taken a leading role in reforming Medicare, and by default, the entire healthcare system; i.e., Medicare is often seen as the bellwether for reimbursement change by commercial payers. Last year, on January 26, 2015, Secretary Sylvia Burwell of Health and Human Services (HHS) established a timeline for moving from volume to value: “Our first g...

The knowledge and practice of doctors (n=40) towards complementary medicine (CM) in 16 health clinics in the Kinta District were assessed by questionnaire. Thirty-four (85%) responded. More than half felt that acupuncture (73.50), homeopathy (59%) and herbal medicine (59%) were occasionally harmful. Forty-four percent felt manipulative therapy was frequently harmful. Relaxation technique (79%) ...

Fluorescein isothiocyanate-labelled goat antihuman immunoglobulin (anti-IgG, anti-IgA, anti-IgM) and anticomplement conjugates were used to detect antibody or complement-coated bacteria from the oropharynx of patients with pharyngitis. Throat smears prepared from patients with a positive culture for group A beta-hemolytic streptococci had significantly more bacteria that stained with labelled a...

Intrusion detection technology is an effective approach to dealing with the problems of network security. In this paper, we present an intrusion detection model based on hybrid neural network and C4.5.The key idea is to take advantage of different classification abilities of neural network and the C4.5 algorithm for different attacks. What is more, the model could also be updated by the C4.5 ru...

I magine a society with perfect economic equality. Perhaps out of sheer coincidence, the supply and demand for different types of labor happen to produce an equilibrium in which everyone earns exactly the same income. As a result, no one worries about the gap between the rich and poor, and no one debates to what extent public policy should make income redistribution a priority. Because people e...

That tired Ten-Percent claim pops up all the time. Last year, national magazine ads for U.S. Satellite Broadcasting showed a drawing of a brain. Under it was the caption, "You only use 11 percent of its potential." Well, they're a little closer than the ten-percent figure, but still off by about 89 percent. In July 1998, ABC television ran promotional spots for "The Secret Lives of Men," one of...

An information retrieval performance measure that is interpreted as the percent of perfect performance (PPP) can be used to study the effects of the inclusion of specific document features or feature classes or techniques in an information retrieval system. Using this, one can measure the relative quality of a new ranking algorithm, the result of incorporating specific types of metadata or folk...