BACKGROUND The debate on US healthcare reform has largely focused on the introduction of a public health plan option. While supporters stress various beneficial effects that would arise from increased competition in the health insurance market, opponents often contend that a public plan would drive insurers out of the market and potentially lead to the 'collapse' of the private health insurance...

In Brazilian health insurance sector, the fee-for-service model still remains the major payment method for health services, and predominates in the relationship between hospitals and private health insurance companies. After the creation of Health Insurance Qualification Program (HIQP), which focuses on the quality of the assistance given to consumers, the health insurance companies will be eva...

The goals of this paper are twofold: we describe common features in data sets from motor vehicle insurance companies and we investigate a general strategy which exploits the knowledge of such features. The results of the strategy are a basis to develop insurance tariffs. The strategy is applied to a data set from motor vehicle insurance companies. We use a nonparametric approach based on a comb...

The study examined interest of farmers and insurance companies in farm insurance. The sample consisted of 110 respondents; 100 farmers and 10 insurance companies. The Probit model was used to analyse the effect of factors affecting the willingness of cocoa farmers to accept farm insurance. All of the respondents had ever heard of one or more types of insurance whiles 32% had knowledge of farm i...

this paper analyzes the relationship between capital structure and earning management. for analyzing we use 119 non-financial companies that listed in tehran stock exchange from 2000 to 2008. the researchers will focus on comparing the jones model and the modified jones model, which are the two most frequently used model in empirical analysis nowadays. earnings management is a kind of managemen...

OBJECTIVE To investigate whether radiographically evident osteoarthritis (ROA) in 55-65-year-old men and women is associated with specific alleles or genotypes of the cartilage matrix protein (CRTM) and cartilage link protein (CRTL1) genes. METHODS Cases were selected from a population-based study on the presence of ROA of the knee or hip. Further radiographic analysis included scoring for sp...

This paper explores the efficiency of UK specialist and composite insurers transacting general insurance business. The concept of efficiency concerns an insurer’s ability to produce a given set of outputs (such as premiums and investment income) via the use of inputs such as administrative and sales staff and financial capital. An insurer is said to be technically efficient if it cannot reduce ...

Today's information technology (IT) sourcing endeavors have moved beyond outsourcing through the implementation of multisourcing. Multisourcing can be defined as the blending of services from multiple company-internal and companyexternal suppliers. The increasing importance of multisourcing is acknowledged by both practitioners and researchers. However, multisourcing has not been sufficiently c...

This study aims to analyze and apply the effect of current ratio (CR), total asset turnover (TATO), debt (DAR), equity (DER) on return assets (ROA). The population in this is plantation companies with 21 a sample companies. sampling technique used saturated sample/census; that is, all sampled. data collection uses documentation from financial reports published IDX's official website, namely www...