This special report synthesizes the findings of a Health Care Financing Administration grant which allowed the author to analyze hospital finance in six foreign countries and in the United States. The author identified the principal problems facing hospital owners, carriers, and governments in the United States, and he conducted lengthy field work abroad to learn how each country dealt with the...

challenges to physicians – those with specific business interests as well as those whose sole focus is patient care. Understanding the law and knowing which, if any, of the many Stark exceptions apply to your arrangement is essential. Part I of this series explained the purpose of the Stark statute, how it differs from the anti-kickback statute and how you can determine whether it applies to ...

background: according to previous studies, variable percent of nurses suffering from psychological problems or disorders. identifying preventive factors of psychological disorders to be used more frequently and risk factors of these disorders to eliminate them are essential in improving mental health of staff. the present study aims to assess the relationship between motivational function of he...

BACKGROUND Stroke may lead to several health problems, but positive effects can be promoted by learning to perform physical therapy techniques correctly. OBJECTIVE To compare two different types of observational practice (video instructions and demonstration by a physical therapist) during the use of incentive spirometry (IS). METHOD A total of 20 patients with diagnosis of stroke and 20 he...

Several recent papers have proposed recursive Lagrangian-basedmethods for solving dynamic contracting problems. Thesemethods give rise to Bellman operators that incorporate either a dual inf-sup or a saddle point operation. We give conditions that ensure the Bellman operator implied by a dual recursive formulation is contractive. JEL codes: C61, C73, D82, E61.

We propose a generic method for solving infinite-horizon, discrete-time dynamic incentive problems with hidden states. We first combine set-valued dynamic programming techniques with Bayesian Gaussian mixture models to determine irregularly shaped equilibrium value correspondences. Second, we generate training data from those pre-computed feasible sets to recursively solve the dynamic incentive...

Despite attractive theoretical properties, Vickrey auctions are seldom used due to the risk of information revelation and fear of cheating. CVAs (Cryptographic Vickrey Auctions) have been proposed to protect bidders’ privacy or to prevent cheating by the bid taker. This paper focuses on incentive issues for certain CVAs. First, it defines the CVAs of interest and identifies ideal goals for this...