The provision of health services in Australia currently is primarily financed by a unique interaction of public and private insurers. This commentary looks at a loophole in this framework, namely that private insurers have to date been able to avoid funding healthcare for some of their policy holders, as it is not a requirement to use private insurance when treatment occurs in Australian public...

Although the FPLs we study are similar, there are several generalizable differences. The first is how the laws cap prices. Capping prices at (100-115 percent) the amount paid by public insurers, as opposed to private insurers (or cost), is significant not only because reimbursement from public payers is typically lower,1 but also because it is explicitly based upon a patient’s diagnosis rather ...

We investigate risk selection between public and private health insurance in Germany. With risk-rated premiums in the private system and community-rated premiums in the public system, advantageous selection in favor of private insurers is expected. Using 2000 to 2007 data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), we find such selection. While private insurers are unable to select the h...

This paper presents a model of a competitive health insurance market with two risk types and two health benefits. In the benchmark case, community rating insurers (CRIs) are only allowed to offer the basic benefit. The additional benefit is sold by risk rating insurers (RRIs). It is shown that low risk types can only be better off at the expense of high risk types if CRIs are allowed to offer t...

With the advent of hypertext it has become widely accepted that the departure from the so-called " linear " structure of paper increases the likelihood of readers or users becoming lost. In this paper we will discuss this aspect of hypertext in terms of its validity, the lessons to be learned from the psychology of navigation and the applicability of the navigation metaphor to the hypertext dom...

We report 60 and 90 µm observations of 7 millisecond pulsars with ISO. The pulsar PSR B1257+12 is orbited by three planets, and other millisecond pulsars may be orbited by dust disks that represent planets that failed to form or their residue. We do not detect any infrared emission from the 7 pulsars in our sample, and typical upper limits are 100 mJy. Using a simple model, we constrain the typ...

This study was carried out among urban, rural and refugee camp populations in three localities (Rimal, Jabalia Village, Jabalia Refugee Camp), in Gaza Governorates – Palestine. School children between 6 and 11 years old were examined. The prevalence of intestinal parasites among 309 school children was higher in the rural area (53.3%) and the Refugee Camp (48.0%) than in urban areas (33.0%). Ma...