This study explores the impact of program structure on children's use of care by comparing care use in State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) and Medicaid covered populations in a State where children share the same provider network and are both in a primary care case management system with the same Medicaid fee structure. We then compare care use in this system to care use in an SCH...

BACKGROUND There is concern that care provided in the Veterans Health Administration (VA) may be of poorer quality than non-VA health care. We compared use of medications after acute myocardial infarction in the VA with that in non-VA healthcare settings under fee-for-service (FFS) Medicare financing. METHODS AND RESULTS We used clinical data from 2486 VA and 29 249 FFS men >65 years old disc...

Objective: To assess the effect of differing health insurance coverage of physician office visits on the use of colorectal cancer (CRC) tests among an employed and insured population. Method: Cohort study of persons ages 50 to 64 years enrolled in fee-for-service (FFS) or preferred provider organization (PPO) health plans, where FFS plan enrollees bear disproportionate share of office visit cov...

In 2012, the Medicare program paid private health plans $136 billion to cover about 13 million beneficiaries who received Part A and B benefits through the Medicare Advantage (MA) program rather than traditional fee-for-service (FFS) Medicare. Private plans have been a part of the program since the 1970s. Debate about the policy goals--Should they cost less per beneficiary than FFS Medicare? Sh...

BACKGROUND In 1995 in an effort to control costs, the State of Colorado implemented a pilot capitated payment system for individuals eligible for public financing of their mental health services. Contracts were with both Not-For-Profit (NFP) firms and For-Profit (FP) firms; the remainder were in the fee-for-service system (FFS). Pharmaceuticals were not included in the capitation rate. However,...

BACKGROUND Dose-escalated (DE) radiation therapy (RT) and androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) improve prostate cancer outcomes over standard-dose RT. The benefit of adding ADT to DE-RT for men with intermediate-risk prostate cancer (IR-PrCa) is uncertain. PATIENTS AND METHODS We identified 636 men treated for IR-PrCa with DE-RT (>75Gy). The adult comorbidity evaluation-27 index classifed comor...

With the Supreme Court's upholding of the Affordable Healthcare Act (ACA), all eyes have now turned to the industry to see whether this law can truly improve the health status of our nation. In 2014, major changes are expected to occur, including state health insurance exchanges and Medicaid expansion. Thus, many observers have remarked that the ACA's focus is more about improving access to hea...

To achieve the most energy-efficient operation, this brief presents a circuit design technique for separating the power supply voltage (VDD) of flip-flops (FFs) from that of combinational circuits, called the higher voltage FF (HVFF). Although VDD scaling can reduce the energy, the minimum operating voltage (VDDmin) of FFs prevents the operation at the optimum supply voltage that minimizes the ...

OBJECTIVE To assess the availability, completeness, and quality of the Behavioral Health Organization (BHO) encounter data in MAX 2009. DATA SOURCE The Medicaid Analytic Extract (MAX) 2009. METHODS We compared metrics of reporting completeness and quality for BHOs to similar metrics for six states that primarily cover MH and SA services on a FFS basis. For the IP file, number of encounters ...

High Temperature Hydrogen Attack (HTHA) is a damage mechanism with a significant impact in the refinery industry, internationally. The mechanism results in gradual and relatively slow degradation of the vessel material during the incubation time period, but more rapid degradation thereafter. The paper gives an overview of this damage mechanism in the context of inspection surveys to identify de...