The US healthcare system is in crisis, with documented gaps in quality, safety, access, and affordability. Many believe the solution to unsustainable cost increases is increased patient cost-sharing. From an overall cost perspective, reduced consumption of certain essential services may yield short-term savings but lead to worse health and markedly higher costs down the road--in complications, ...

Using data from 49 states and Washington, D.C., we analyzed changes in cost-sharing under health plans offered to individuals and families through state and federal exchanges from 2014 to 2015. We examined eight vehicles for cost-sharing, including deductibles, copayments, coinsurance, and out-of-pocket limits, and compared findings with cost-sharing under employer-based insurance. We found cos...

Some employers are implementing reference-pricing benefit designs, which establish limits on the amount they will pay for some procedures covered by employer-sponsored insurance. Employees are required to pay the difference between the employer’s contribution limit and the actual price received by the hospital. These initiatives encourage patients to select low-price facilities and indirectly e...

The Integrated Healthcare Association is coordinating an episode of care payment project for knee and hip replacement surgery, which will be expanding into other diagnostic and surgical procedures. he Integrated Healthcare Association (IHA) is coordinating a bundled episode-ofcare (EOC) payment project for knee and hip replacement surgery, which will be expanding into other diagnostic and surgi...

This paper describes the redesign of health benefits at Covered California-the nation's largest health insurance exchange, which covers 1.3 million individuals, and its benefit designs extending to hundreds of thousands more enrollees through insurance products sold outside the exchange-with respect to specialty drugs for the 2016 enrollment year. The catalyst for benefit redesign came from adv...

BACKGROUND Fees charged for similar imaging tests often vary dramatically within the same market, leading to wide variation in insurer spending and consumer cost-sharing. Reference pricing is an insurance design that offers good coverage to patients up to a defined contribution limit but requires the patients who select high-priced facilities to pay the remainder out of pocket. OBJECTIVES To ...

Hyperthreading technology, which brings the concept of simultaneous multithreading to the Intel architecture, was first introduced on the Intel Xeon processor in early 2002 for the server market. In November 2002, Intel launched the technology on the Intel Pentium 4 at clock frequencies of 3.06 GHz and higher, making the technology widely available to the consumer market. This technology signal...

The purpose of this study is to explore the design equity cooperation mechanism in sharing logistics service supply chain. This designs a two-echelon chain composed an urban joint distribution company and N companies. jointly established by companies based on specific shares investment. We establish models under revenue-sharing or cost-sharing contracts. Revenue-sharing factor parameter. When m...

Some employers are implementing reference-pricing benefit designs, which establish limits on the amount they will pay for some procedures covered by employer-sponsored insurance. Employees are required to pay the difference between the employer's contribution limit and the actual price received by the hospital. These initiatives encourage patients to select low-price facilities and indirectly e...