We study the effects of 'balance billing', i.e., allowing physicians to charge a fee from patients in addition to the fee paid by Medicare. First, we show that on pure efficiency grounds the optimal Medicare fee under balance billing is zero. An active Medicare policy thus can only be justified when distributional concerns are accounted for. Extending the analysis by Glazer and McGuire, we ther...

Walton’s paper [l] describes a situation for the Instrument Landing System (ILS), glide path antenna that occurs during a period of time when a deep blanket of snow transitions from freshly fallen to the melted condition. During this time period the air, snow, and Earth reflection interaction may cause the ground reflection component of the guidance signal (image) to nearly vanish. This reducti...

It is commonly argued that in recent years pharmaceutical companies have directed their R&D towards small improvements of existing compounds instead of more risky drastic innovations. In this paper we show that the proliferation of these small innovations is likely to be linked to the lack of market sensitivity of a part of the demand to changes in prices. Compared to their social contribution,...

Racial and Ethnic Disparities in the Use of Drug Therapy The purpose of this research is to explain the variation in the utilization of drug therapy for the medical conditions of depression, high cholesterol, and hypertension between Hispanics, non-Hispanic blacks, and non-Hispanics whites using Oaxaca-type decomposition analysis based on logit estimates. We find that almost the entire share of...

We have used UV resonance Raman and absorption spectroscopy to examine the secondary structure of angiotensin 11 ( AII) in aqueous solution and in phospholipid micelles. Absorption difference spectroscopic measurements are used to determine the association constant of A11 with dodecylphosphocholine (DPC) micelles, and the UV Raman spectral data are used to examine the secondary structure altera...

We report the enhancement of both visible and near infrared (NIR) emissions from Nd(3+) ions via Ce(3+) sensitization in colloidal nanocrystals for the first time. This is achieved in citrate capped Nd(3+)-doped CeF3 nanocrystals under ultraviolet (UV) irradiation (λex = 282 nm). The lasing transition ((4)F3/2 → (4)I11/2) at 1064 nm from Nd(3+)-doped CeF3 nanocrystals has much higher emission i...

Assessing the Effectiveness of Health Care Cost Containment Measures Using SOEP panel data and difference-in-differences methods, this study is the first to empirically evaluate the effectiveness of four different health care cost containment measures within an integrated framework. The four measures investigated were introduced in Germany in 1997 to reduce moral hazard and public health expend...

This paper provides fi eld evidence on (a) how price framing aff ects consumers’ decision to switch health insurance plans and (b) how the price elasticity of demand for health insurance can be infl uenced by policymakers through simple regulatory eff orts. In 2009, in order to foster competition among health insurance companies, German federal regulation required health insurance companies to ...

Relative Efficiency, Scale Effect, and Scope Effect of Public Hospitals: Evidence from Australia Using the 1997-1998 New South Wales public-hospitals comparison data, we investigate the hospital-level inefficiency by applying a stochastic-frontier multiproduct cost function. We use a flexible translog cost function to reduce the measurement errors of the outputs of the hospital. The main findin...

Bronchial asthma and pulmonary tuberculosis In this series there were 91 cases of asthma and among them 15 patients (16.5 per cent) developed tuberculosis. Of these 15 cases, 13 had rr-ray examinations which showed unilateral disease in 6, and bilateral in 7. The lesions were mostly exudative; one had breakdown and another definite cavities. The sputum was positive in 9 cases, negative in 5, an...