Approximately 60 percent of U.S. cities with more than 25,000 residents now impose impact fees to fund infrastructure needed to service new housing and other development (GAO, 2000). In 89 jurisdictions selected for study in California, the state in which impact fees are most heavily used, the average amount of fees imposed on singlefamily homes in new subdivisions in 1999 was $19,552, with fee...

Public health systems in most low-income countries are unfair to poor people. Clearly preventive and curative public health-care services, especially hospital services, are accessed by poor people less frequently than by those who are better off . This injustice is now high on the international agenda. A solution for this issue has some global dimensions, such as the need for a large transfer o...

Debit cards have become an indispensable part of the U.S. payments system, accounting for more than a third of consumer payments at point of sale. With this development has come controversy: Card networks charge merchants fees that merchants believe are too high. And most of the fees are ad valorem—that is, based on transaction value—rather than fixed fees per transaction. Merchants are critica...

sweeping US$130-billion health care reform plan, the country faces huge obstacles to progress in what’s been described as the world’s largest health care experiment. The plan centres on quickly reforming hospital management while delivering universal access to primary health care through national insurance schemes. But roadblocks have arisen, according to new research presented at the annual wo...

Editorial The American dream O sonho americano Recently, we had the opportunity to attend another congress of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS). We observed that some of the exuberance of the famous exhibition stands, which had always been grandiose and demonstrated the economic power of the system, had gone. This year, they were somewhat more modest, with the exception of one...

OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to determine the fiscal impact of implementation of a novel emergency department (ED) point-of-care (POC) ultrasound billing and reimbursement program. METHODS This was a single-center retrospective study at an academic medical center. A novel POC ultrasound billing protocol was implemented using the Q-path Web-based image archival system. Patient care ult...