The results can be tragic. Patients with addictions are unlikely to wait the hours or days it takes health insurers to approve the medications they need. Insurers are changing their practices, but not without some outside pressure.

In 1996, free choice of health insurers was introduced to the German social health insurance system. One objective was to increase efficiency through competition. A crucial precondition for effective competition among health insurers is that consumers search for lower-priced health insurers. We test this hypothesis by estimating the price elasticities of insurers' market shares. We use unique p...

The Institute of Medicine has described the "death-denying character of American society'' and surely, there is an opportunity to change this character. Despite our understandable concern with costs, end-of-life care options must be variously considered from economic, ethical, and legislative perspectives. We consider these multiple perspectives of end-of-life care in an attempt to inform curre...

In this work, we propose an end-to-end approach to the language identification (LID) problem based on Convolutional Deep Neural Networks (CDNNs). The use of CDNNs is mainly motivated by the ability they have shown when modeling speech signals, and their relatively low-cost with respect to other deep architectures in terms of number of free parameters. We evaluate different configurations in a s...

OBJECTIVE To compare stakeholder expectations of outcome of physiotherapy management of acute low back pain. DESIGN Observational design using interviews and questionnaires. SETTING Practice/workplace. STUDY PARTICIPANTS The study sample was from South Australia. It comprised 74 physiotherapists randomly selected from professional association listings (49.3% response rate), 121 physiother...