This policy brief discusses preventive care benefits and cost-sharing included in health insurance provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) legislation and highlights some consequences to Americans and the country in terms of healthcare costs and value.

background measures taken over the past four years in greece to reduce pharmaceutical expenditure have led to significant price reductions for medicines, but have also changed patient cost-sharing rates for prescription drugs. this study attempts to capture the resulting increase in patients’ out-of-pocket (oop) expenses for prescription drugs during the 2011-2014 period.   methods the authors ...

The members of a chain always try to find new ways in order to raise their profit. Hence we intend to study two different scenarios in a single item two-echelon green supply chain including two manufacturers and one retailer to study the effects of two effective contracts on members’ profit. Two scenarios are discussed and in first one, first manufacturer proposes quantity discount contract to ...

Ride-sharing or vehicle-pooling allows commuters to team up spontaneously for transportation cost sharing. This has become a popular trend in the emerging paradigm of sharing economy. One crucial component support effective ride-sharing is matching mechanism that pairs suitable commuters. Traditionally, been performed centralized manner, whereby an operator arranges according global objective (...

Physicians, health plans, and health systems are increasingly evaluated and rewarded based on Health Plan Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS) and HEDIS-like performance measures. Concurrently, employers and health plans continue to try to control expenditures by increasing out-of-pocket costs for patients. The authors use fixed-effect logit models to assess how rising copayment rates...

This work initiates the study of cost-sharing mechanisms that, in addition to the usual incentive compatibility conditions, make it disadvantageous for the users to employ pseudonyms. We show that this is possible only if all serviced users pay the same price, which implies that such mechanisms do not exist even for certain subadditive cost functions. In practice, a user can increase her utilit...

Multiple cost sharing rules often coexist in seemingly identical environments. We use shared irrigation costs as a context for examining the extent to which the structural environment explains the selection of a cost-sharing rule. We find that environmental factors affecting the costs and benefits derived from irrigation, as well as those determining the distribution of irrigators along the irr...

Units of a good are produced at some symmetric cost. A mechanism elicits agents’ willingness to pay for one unit of the good, allocates some goods to some agents, and covers the cost by charging those agents. We introduce the generalized average cost mechanism (GAC) for arbitrary symmetric cost functions. GAC is the only Pareto selection among group strategyproof mechanisms that treat equal age...

As health reform drives the largest expansion of health insurance since Medicare and policy-makers grapple with how to slow the increase in health care spending, cost-sharing--the division of health care costs between patients and insurers--is considered an important tool. This synthesis reviews the evidence on cost-sharing. Key findings include: Research consistently shows demand for health ca...