The ability to correctly code and document for purposes of physician reimbursement has become an increasingly essential part of long-term care (LTC) practice. As was pointed out by Stone and Tarnove in a recent article, “the complexity and nuances of these codes have cost physicians huge sums of money and actually have driven many excellent, caring physicians to stop providing services to our n...

Political statements about the relationship between the economy and health intensify during economic downturns and fade in times of prosperity. Population health researchers share this cyclical interest in that the numbers of peer-reviewed publications on this topic increase during and immediately after recessions. In this issue of the Journal, Cylus et al. (Am J Epidemiol. 2014;180(1):45-52) f...

Hagadorn and co-authors (HKMM) invite the interpretation that most of the large increase in unemployment since 2007 can be blamed on the rising generosity of unemployment insurance benefits, leaving little to blame on the financial crisis. But the paper does not make that claim. And the claim is incorrect. The right way to explain the claims of the the paper is that a policy of extending UI ben...

MEXICO'S COMPREHENSIVE Social I n surance Act was signed by President Avila Camacho on December 31, 1942, and promulgated on January 19, 1943. Contributions became effective i n the Federal. District on January 1, 1944; i n March 1945 the law was extended to the municipal ity of Puebla, State of Puebla, and i n August 1945 to the municipal ity of Monterrey, State of Nueva Leon. This year has se...

In spite of some cutbacks in entitlements, many welfare states' spending has continuously increased over the past decades, leading to larger tax burdens and often higher marginal tax rates. Proposals for reform often focus on reduced social insurance benefits and more actuarial insurance premia. In this paper it is shown that such reforms may have a smaller potential for reducing the marginal t...

with respect to the proportion of oldage assistance recipients receiving old-age and survivors insurance. As the coverage of the insurance Program becomes virtually universal, this proportion will no doubt aPpreach loo percent. It will never reach it, however, because many individuals at the lowest economic levels (low-income farmers and migratory and occasional farm and domestic workers) will ...

This study was based on physician claims records from three Blue Shield Plans. The principal results are: • Physicians are income-motivated. This means that income incentives can be incorporated into reimbursement systems to achieve specific ends, and that care should be taken to assure that new mechanisms do not create income incentives for physicians to act contrary to policy objectives. • Ph...

Background: Nonmarket stated preferences valuation, especially discrete choice experiments (DCEs), is one of the commonly used techniques in the health sector. The primary purpose of this approach is to help select attributes and attributes-levels that are able to properly describe health care products or services. This study aimed at developing attributes and attributes-levels for basic health...

We develop a simple yet realistic model of income insurance, where the individual’s ability and willingness to work is treated as a continuous variable. In this framework, income insurance not only provides income smoothing, it also relieves the individual from particularly burdensome work. As a result, the individual adjusts his labor supply in a continuous fashion to the implicit tax wedge of...