OBJECTIVES In national and local discussions of health care reform, there is disagreement about whether a national health insurance plan should be mandatory or voluntary. This study describes characteristics of low- income people who were more likely or less likely to be covered by a voluntary plan. METHODS Survey data were available from an evaluation of Washington State's Basic Health Plan,...

1 Chicken and water chestnuts A case-based planner devises new plans by retrieving and adapting old ones from memory (see, e. Ideally, the plan it retrieves from memory should be one that requires the least adaptation to t the current circumstances. Finding this plan in a cost-eeective way is thus a key issue in case-based reasoning (see, e. The approach that is generally taken to this problem ...

AIMS: Increased access to health care, including addiction treatment, has long been a goal of health reform in the U.S. An unanswered question is whether reform will change the way people get to addiction treatment; when treatment is easily accessible, do individuals self-refer, or do they still enter treatment via ultimatums, and if so, from which sources? To begin examining this, we used a si...

BACKGROUND Mental, neurological, and substance (MNS) use disorders are a leading cause of disability worldwide; specifically in Peru, MNS affect 1 in 5 persons. However, the great majority of people suffering from these disorders do not access care, thereby making necessary the improvement of existing conditions including a major rearranging of current health system structures beyond care deliv...

Colorectal cancer represents a major health problem and an important economic burden in Puerto Rico. In the 1990's, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico implemented a health care reform through the privatization of the public health system. The goal was to ensure access to health services, eliminate disparities for medically indigent citizens and provide special coverage for high-risk conditions suc...

~| y electing Democrat Harris Wofford B to the Senate over former Attorney General Richard T h o r n b u r g h in November 1991, the voters of Pennsylvania proved that healthcare reform is a politically salient issue. Policy analysts, amazed that Wofford's healthcare reform message was a key factor in his election, have debated during the past few months whether this was a fluke or the precurso...

The required core competencies of outstanding information technology outsourcing (ITO) engineers were analysed and the results outlined in this article. Several shortcomings are discussed that exist in the outstanding ITO engineers’ training in traditional software-related specialties at undergraduate universities. An overall plan has been proposed to train outstanding ITO engineers through uni...

We examine the effect of the evolution of President Clinton’s health care reform proposal over January 1992–October 1993 on pharmaceutical stock prices. We identify a 52.3 percent decline in market-adjusted prices, which we then associate with health care reform. Applying a new technique, isotonic regression, we find most of the decline occurred gradually. Much of the decline occurred as the Cl...