Improving cost transparency in healthcare creates opportunities to empower patients and reduce spending. Medical prices vary widely within U.S. markets but few consumers (i.e., patients) have the information to shop for their healthcare services. Consumers are starting to question why their healthcare bills are so high – and why they can’t find healthcare prices at all. In this work we apply pr...

BACKGROUND To inform consumers and restrain health care cost growth, efforts to promote transparency and to reimburse for care episodes are accelerating in the United States. OBJECTIVE To compare characteristics and costs of 30-day episode of care for hip and knee replacement occurring in High Value Healthcare Collaborative (HVHC)-member hospitals to those occurring in like non-HVHC-member ho...

Health insurance, as we generally think of it in the United States, began with the Great Depression in the 1930s. In this chapter, we review the history of health insurance and demonstrate how that history is linked to current health insurance developments. Predating private health insurance were efforts at government-sponsored coverage for workplace injury and a tradition of industrial sicknes...

in a recent editorial in this journal pierre-gerlier forest foretells a coming revolution in health policy based on the synthesis of four conceptual innovations and one technological breakthrough. as much as i agree with the intellectual story told in this editorial i present a more skeptical view of the effect of paradigm shifts on healthcare systems on the ground. i argue that ideas triumph w...

T his paper investigates the existence of possible spillover effects among four main asset markets namely foreign exchange, stock, gold, and housing markets in Iran from 2002:03 to 2015:06. For this purpose, we have exploited Sigma-Point Kalman Filter (SPKF) to extract the bubble component of assets prices in the aforementioned Markets. Then, in order to analyze the price bubbles spi...

For more than 40 years, various health services researchers have noted the many distortions in the American healthcare economy that produce massive information assymetries and almost near opacity in the medical services delivery market. This paper comments on the potential of health information exchanges (HIE) to address many of these deeply embedded structural issues. Although hundreds of HIEs...

This commentary explores some of the issues raised by Gilbert et al. short communication, Morality and Markets in the NHS. The increasing role of market mechanisms and the changing types of healthcare providers together with the use of choice and competition to drive improvements in quality in the National Health Service (NHS), all have important ethical implications. In order for the NHS to co...

We describe MARI (Multi-Attribute Resource Intermediary), a project being conducted in the Software Agents group at the MIT Media Lab, and the challenges and issues we are facing in its design and implementation. MARI is an intermediary architecture intended as a generalized platform for the specification and brokering of heterogeneous goods and services. The project reflects our vision of how ...