This article identifies the impact of managed-care reforms on the utilization of medical services within the military health-services system. The data come from a recent demonstration project that substituted an HMO and PPO for traditional FFS arrangements. Results from a semiparametric model indicate that the generosity of benefits in the HMO increased demand for ambulatory services. Unlike...

OBJECTIVES In 2002, the Mississippi Division of Medicaid enacted several policies to curb prescription spending including increasing prescription copayments from $1 to $3 per brand, a cap of 7 prescriptions per month, a 34-day supply limitation, and a 5% reduction in dispensing fees. The objectives of this study were to examine the influence of these policies on (1) compliance to antipsychotic ...

Medical expenditures in workers' compensation programs have been subjected to few cost containment strategies. As workers' compensation costs have escalated, however, increasing attention is being given to the role of medical fee schedules in containing the prices of medical services. To this end, we develop a model for estimating the potential cost savings from implementing medical fee schedul...

To secure a successful product in today's era of cost containment, manufacturers and developers of new in vitro diagnostic technologies must consider payment issues--coverage and reimbursement by healthcare insurers--as critical market forces that must be addressed in the business plan. Similar to the regulatory hurdles involving 510(k)s and premarket applications, the requirements for payment ...

ÐMessage-driven confidence-driven (MDCD) error containment and recovery, a low-cost approach to mitigating the effect of software design faults in distributed embedded systems, is developed for onboard guarded software upgrading for deep-space missions. In this paper, we first describe and verify the MDCD algorithms in which we introduce the notion of ªconfidence-drivenº to complement the ªcomm...

Under new pressures for cost containment, hospitals are increasingly asserting interests that conflict with those of physicians. Professor Havighurst argues that legal rules under which practitioners have challenged denials of hospital admitting privileges should be clarified in order that hospitals can more effectively carry out their new cost-containment and other responsibilities. He invokes...