According to the American Diabetes Association, the cost of treating diabetes in North Carolina was approximately $5.3 billion in 2006. Reigning in diabetes-related costs requires collaboration between third-party payers, health care professionals, and people with diabetes. This article reviews innovative policy changes that affect all 3 groups and are intended to improve diabetes-associated ca...

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P ayment for cancer care will change radically over the next decade as the nation struggles to hold down health care costs, experts told an early October Institute of Medicine forum, Delivering Affordable Cancer Care in the 21st Century. Traditional fee-for-service medicine, in which oncology reimbursement relies disproportionately on profits from expensive chemotherapy drugs, will give way to ...

If adopted by EPA, proposed new regulations on stack emissions will force many utilities with coalfired boilers to reduce their NOx emissions to levels which are substantially lower then can be achieved with current low NOx burner technology. To meet these requirements, some utilities are anticipating the need to use selective catalytic reduction (SCR) for NOx control. New SCR catalysts under d...

Under the assumptions of the market of Black and Scholes, options are redundant since, through the classic Black-Scholes delta hedging argument, they can be replaced by an equivalent combination the risky asset underlying the option and a risk free asset. We show that options are not redundant when small proportional transaction costs of size ε are added to the model, which provides mathematica...

BACKGROUND Medical Savings Accounts are an attempt to reduce health care costs by transferring responsibility for expenditures to patients, while providing them with state-supported base amounts to cover some of the costs. We wondered whether such a system would actually be effective, given the fact that medical care expenditures (and illness) are unequally distributed across the population. ...

Clinician dependent costs are the costs of care that are under the discretion of the healthcare provider. These costs include the costs of drugs, tests and investigations, and discretionary outpatient visits and impatient stays. The purpose of this review was to summarize recent evidence, relevant to both developed and developing countries on whether evidence based clinical guidelines can chang...