The Affordable Care Act enacts a new payment system for private health plans available to Medicare beneficiaries through the Medicare Advantage (MA) program. The system, which is being phased in through 2017, aims to (1) reduce the excess pay­ments received by private plans relative to per capita spending in traditional Medicare, and (2) reward plans that earn high performance ratings. Using 20...

abstract with consideration to the resource limitation, it seems necessary to design cropping pattern scientifically in order to increase productivity of production factors and to decrease production average costs. this studyaimed at identifying the optimum cropping pattern based on comparative advantage in three counties of ilam province including darreh shahr, ivan, and shirvan chardaval. to ...

About 30 percent of Medicare beneficiaries enroll in private Medicare Advantage (MA) plans but do so at a relatively high-cost. This paper explores the advantages and challenges of introducing competitive bidding among MA plans (Plan One) or among MA plans and Fee-for-Service (Plan Two or Premium Support). We conclude that competitive bidding could reduce the cost of Medicare, especially in den...

in most of the multi-criteria decision making problems, it is important to have necessary information about relative importance of each criteria. in this group of problems, weights measure the relative importance of preferences of each criteria in comparison with the other decision making criteria. in this research, the nise method has been used for mapping mean-variance efficient frontier. nis...

Chinese relative clauses are an important test case for pitting the predictions of expectation-based accounts against those of memory-based theories. The memory-based accounts predict that object relatives should be easier to process than subject relatives because, in object relatives, less linguistic material intervenes between the head noun and the gap (or verb) that it associates with. By co...

The literature on ERPT has not considered product-level comparative advantage (CA) as a source of heterogeneous firm productivity. However, a firm’s production choice may determine its productivity level and also its pricing decision as both the degree of market power and the fixed costs of exporting vary across products. This paper empirically analyses the export pricing behaviour of Chinese a...