Rural enrollment in Medicare Advantage (MA) and other prepaid plans grew by 15% from December 2008 to December 2009, faster than the 10% national growth rate. Preferred provider organization (PPO) plans drove the increased enrollment in MA plans in rural areas in 2009, while private fee-for-service (PFFS) plans continued to dominate the market with over 50% of enrollment. This landscape could c...

In a reversal of recent trends, private fee-for-service (PFFS) enrollment fell dramatically in rural areas in early 2010. As a result, Medicare Advantage (MA) enrollment in rural areas (excluding other prepaid plans) fell slightly in early 2010 for the first time in years. The dramatic drop in PFFS enrollment was offset by increases in enrollment in preferred provider organization (PPO) and hea...

OBJECTIVE To compare health insurance coverage and type of coverage for adults with and without diabetes. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS The data used were from 2,704 adults who self-reported diabetes and 25,008 adults without reported diabetes in the 2009 National Health Interview Survey. Participants reported on their current type of health insurance coverage, demographic information, diabetes...

Background Although there is a general agreement on the benefits of evidence informed health policy development given resource constraints especially in Low-Income Countries (LICs), the definition of what evidence is, and what evidence is suitable to guide decision-making is still unclear. Our study is contributing to filling this knowledge gap. We aimed to explore health policy actors’ views r...

Jereon Vink ([1993]) argued that there are two options for what he called a realistic solution to the quantum measurement problem: (1) select a preferred set of observables for which definite values are assumed to exist, or (2) attempt to assign definite values to all observables simultaneously (1810–1). While conventional wisdom has it that the second option is ruled out by the Kochen-Specker ...

ABSTRACT: Feasible solutions of Bilevel programming (BLP) problem have to satisfy the optimality conditions of a lower level optimization problem which is defined as part of its constraints. Multiobjective BLP (MOBLP) problems are the special case of BLP problems with multiple objectives at the upper level which require every feasible solution to satisfy the Pareto optimality conditions of a lo...

A new combinatorial characterization of a gray-tone image called Euler Vector is proposed. Euler number of a binary image is a well-known topological feature, which remains invariant under translation, rotation, scaling, and rubber-sheet transformation of the image. Euler vector comprises of a 4-tuple, where each element is an integer representing the Euler number of the partial binary image fo...