Health care reform is directed toward improving access and quality while containing costs. An essential part of this is improvement of pricing models to more accurately reflect the costs of providing care. Transparent prices that reflect costs are necessary to signal information to consumers and producers. This information is central in a consumer-driven marketplace. The rapid increase in high ...

Hospitals frequently exhibit wide variation in their prices, and employers and insurers are now experimenting with the use of incentives to encourage employees to make price-conscious choices. This article examines two major new benefit design instruments being tested. In reference pricing, an employer or insurer makes a defined contribution toward covering the cost of a particular service and ...

Medicare Part D presents a novel privatized structure for a government pharmaceutical benefit. Incentives for firms to provide low prices and high quality are generated by consumers who choose among multiple insurance plans in each market. To date the literature has primarily focused on consumers, and has calculated how much could be saved if they chose better plans. In this paper we take the n...

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 ...

In the past decade, studies showed that many consumers innovate for themselves. Sometimes their innovations are useful to others and potentially enhance social welfare. Unfortunately, diffusion fails as lack incentives inform others. Online knowledge sharing platforms (OKSPs), which can be stimulated with government support, may alleviate this problem. Platform communication trigger passive int...

Hosting an on-demand media content streaming service has been a challenging task mainly because of the outrageously enormous network and server bandwidth required to deliver large amount of content data to users simultaneously. We propose an infrastructure that helps online media content providers offload their server and network resources for media streaming. Using application level resource d...

generally the biggest group of people diet every grain of rice cereal group is the second largest member in some regions. however, unlike other grains such as rice, white beans and cooked completely consumed, fastidious taste may vary from one region to another. the overall index of consumer tastes more rice grains in appearance, size and shape, manner of cooking, the aroma, the taste of it mea...