Please see the full text contains the Pesian abstracts for this volume.

In the article, “Public Support for Smoke-Free Air Strategies Among Smokers and Nonsmokers, New York City, 2010– 2012,” the authors inadvertently listed the wrong grant number in the Acknowledgments section. The correct grant number is Cooperative Agreement number 1U58DP002419–01 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – Communities Putting Prevention to Work. The correction was mad...

Ever since the US Congress adopted the diagnosis related group (DRG) system for paying hospitals for Medicare patients in 1983, case payment mechanisms gradually have become the principal means of reimbursing hospitals in most industrialized countries. Nevertheless, the motives underlying the introduction and the development, as well the specific design features of DRG systems, vary greatly acr...