Purchasers and health plans are reemphasizing deductibles, coinsurance, and other consumer incentives in response to renewed inflation and the continuing backlash against managed care. This paper explores the partial convergence of cost sharing and benefit design for preferred provider and health maintenance products and highlights experiments that foster price-conscious choice among benefit co...

The 1950 amendments to the Social Security Act made substantial changes in old-age and survivors insurance coverage and benefits. Of the new provisions that were effective September 1950, one—the increase in current insurance benefits—had an almost immediate effect on public assistance caseloads and expenditures, as reported in the following pages. A later article will summarize the impact on t...

We develop an empirical method to assess the degree of financial exposure associated with medical care spending among non-elderly U.S. households with employer-sponsored insurance. A key feature of this method is its simplicity – it only requires data on out-of-pocket (OOP) health care spending and total health care spending and does not require detailed knowledge of health insurance benefit de...

The purpose of this study is to present the information on the duration of treatment and the cost of work-related low back pain. Using the compensation-database for 1997 work-related low back pain (n=9,277), this study estimated the duration of treatment, the cost of work-related low back pain, the relationship between them, and probability of being off treatment at different intervals. The mea...

OBJECTIVES As in nearly all European countries, demographic developments in Germany have led to both a relative and an absolute increase in the country's elderly population. The care and support needed by these people is primarily provided by relatives or friends and close acquaintances within the home environment. The major challenges for society are to sustain, promote and support these infor...

BACKGROUND Sickness absence in Sweden is high, particularly in young women and the reasons are unclear. Many Swedish women combine parenthood and work and are facing demands that may contribute to impaired health and well-being. We compared mothers and women without children under different conditions, assuming increased sickness absence in mothers, due to time-based stress and psychological st...

background: general anesthesia draw the most commonly used modalities for post cesarean delivery pain relief is systemic administration of opioids, while the administration of small dose of intrathecal opioid during spinal anesthesia can be a possible alternative. the aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of buprenorphine on cesarean section prescribed intrathecally. methods: in this do...

Vermiculture is the culture of earthworms. The goal is to continually increase the number of worms in order to obtain a sustainable harvest. The worms are either used to expand a vermicomposting operation or sold to customers who use them for the same or other purposes. Vermicomposting is the process by which worms are used to convert organic materials (usually wastes) into a humus-like materia...

The importance of nanotechnology in medical technologies, especially biomedical diagnostics, is indubitable. By taking advantages of nanomaterials, many medical diagnostics methods have been developed so far, including electrochemical nanobiosensors. They have been used for quantification of different clinical biomarkers for detecting, screening, or follow up a disease. microRNAs (miRNAs) are o...