Using data from 49 states and Washington, D.C., we analyzed changes in cost-sharing under health plans offered to individuals and families through state and federal exchanges from 2014 to 2015. We examined eight vehicles for cost-sharing, including deductibles, copayments, coinsurance, and out-of-pocket limits, and compared findings with cost-sharing under employer-based insurance. We found cos...

As policymakers look for savings from the Medicare program, some have proposed eliminating or discouraging "first-dollar coverage" available through privately purchased Medigap policies. Medigap coverage, which beneficiaries obtain to protect themselves from Medicare's cost-sharing requirements and its lack of a cap on out-of-pocket spending, may discourage the judicious use of medical services...

The allocation of risks among the contracting parties in a contract is an important decision affecting the project success. Some risks in a project are uncontrollable; these are imposed to a project by external factors. Since contracting parties can neither control nor affect the occurrence of such risks, their allocation to a party would be inequitable. Therefore the cost overrun related to un...

In this paper, low latency and high throughput texture coding architectures are proposed to realize the 4×4 integer/Hadamard transforms, the quantization (Q), and the inverse-quantization (IQ) schemes for the H.264/AVC application. Based on matrix operations, the efficient fast two-dimensional (2-D) 4×4 transforms can be derived from the proposed one-dimensional (1-D) fast 4×4 transforms throug...

Managing resources in large scale distributed systems is an important concern for both Peer-2-Peer and Computational Grid systems, and is a complex and time sensitive process. Although existing Peer-2-Peer systems are divided into those that support computation (CPU) sharing or data sharing, users in a Computional Grid generally need to share both. Identifying which resources to select is impor...

Dynamic logic is increasingly becoming a logic type of choice for designs requiring high speed and low area. Charge sharing is one of many problems that may cause failure in dynamic logic circuits due to their low noise immunity. The authors address the charge-sharing noise issue. Specifically, they develop an accurate but tractable model for analyzing charge sharing that avoids costly Hspice s...

It was October 25, 1986. Game 6 of the World Series between the New York Mets and the Boston Red Sox was tied in the bottom of the 10th inning, with 2 outs and 1 runner on base. The Mets’ Mookie Wilson hit a routine grounder in the direction of first baseman Bill Buckner, who bent down to scoop it up. But in one of the most infamous incidents in sports history, the ball sailed past Buckner’s ou...

In multi-point Internet communication such as multicast, sometimes there is the need to share the cost of communication between the several agents involved in the connection. This work presents some of the most commonly used incentive-compatible, individual-rational mechanisms that select the participating users and their cost share in a multicast transmission, focusing on efficiency and/or bud...

In this paper we propose a stochastic non-cooperative meta-game approach to assess the role of uncertain CCS deployment on climate agreements among 28 European countries. The game model is identified through statistical emulation of a large set of numerical simulations performed with the computable general equilibrium model GEMINI-E3. In this game the players are the 28 European countries, the ...

In this paper we report evidence on the relationship between trade openness, technology adoption and relative demand for skilled labour in the Turkish manufacturing sector, using firm level data over the period 1980-2001. We first depict the simultaneous increasing trends in international openness and in demand for skills and we show that the shift of the relative demand for labour was mainly d...