Private health insurance (PHI) is an important part of the Australian health system. During the introduction of the recent PHI reforms it was argued that, without the reforms, the public hospital system would undoubtedly collapse under the increased demand for public health services. The increase in PHI coverage might also have been expected to result in an increase in the revenue earned by pub...

Prior studies suggest that hospital care is countercyclical among Medicare beneficiaries, and if anything, procyclical among the non-elderly. In this paper, we provide the first physician-level analysis of changes in healthcare provision to Medicare and privately insured patients across the business cycle. Using Florida discharge data aggregated to the physician level, we find that as county un...

THE Third Circuit has impugned the premise and frustrated the goal. of the new Federal Rule 19 by holding that the indispensable party doctrine is substantive law and therefore unaffected by a rule of procedure.' Following a fatal automobile accident, the executor of a deceased passenger brought a declaratory judgment action to establish the liability of the insurer, which had denied that the p...

This paper uses two methods to compare the impact of health care payments under insurance and user fees. Concentration indices for insured and uninsured groups are computed following the indirect standardisation method to evaluate horizontal inequity in utilisation of basic health care services. The minimum standard approach analyses the extent to which out-of-pocket health spending contributed...

There is continuing controversy about the extent to which publicly insured children are treated differently than privately insured children, and whether differences in treatment matter. We show that on average, hospitals are less likely to admit publicly insured children than privately insured children who present at the ER and the gap grows during high flu weeks, when hospital beds are in high...

On 1,374 food-producing animal farms in 2001-2004, we investigated the influence of antimicrobial usage within 6 months before a survey conducted on antimicrobial resistance in Campylobacter. Tetracyclines and fluoroquinolones were used for therapeutic purposes on 107 and 21 farms, respectively. Oxytetracycline-resistant C. jejuni and C. coli were found in 57.1% (8/14) and 92.5% (37/40) of the ...

BACKGROUND In 2010, foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) occurred for the first time in a decade in Japan. Movement or shipment of people and animals around infected farms was restricted; however these contingency measures proved insufficient to prevent FMD spread. Consequently, a total of 292 farms were confirmed as infected during this outbreak. We conducted a case-control study to identify the risk ...

BACKGROUND Infectious diseases can often be of conservation importance for wildlife. Spillover, when infectious disease is transmitted from a reservoir population to sympatric wildlife, is a particular threat. American mink (Neovison vison) populations across Canada appear to be declining, but factors thus far explored have not fully explained this population trend. Recent research has shown, h...

BACKGROUND Publicly insured women usually have a different demographic background to privately insured women, which is related to poor neonatal outcomes after birth. Given the difference in nature and risk of preterm versus term births, it would be important to compare adverse neonatal outcomes after preterm birth between these groups of women after eliminating the demographic differences betwe...