for helpful comments. Special thanks to Ed Green for discussions on the market contestability and models of innovation portions of this paper and to Patricia Rozaklis for research support as an intern. The views presented in this paper are those of the authors' alone and do not necessarily represent those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago or the Federal Reserve System. Public Policy Studie...

We present some techniques for handling planning problems with numerical expressions that can be specified using the standard planning language PDDL. These techniques are implemented in LPG, a fully-automated planner based on local search that was awarded at the third international planning competition (2002). First, we present a plan representation for handling numerical expressions called Num...

In 2017, the Affordable Care Act’s nongroup marketplaces saw premium increases averaging 21 percent, with substantially higher increases in some states.1 For the 2017 plan year, several insurers left the individual marketplaces (and, in some cases, individual markets as a whole), creating many more rating regions with only one or two insurers. These rating regions, as a result, have little insu...

We have been building an auto/heteroassociative spiking neural network combined with a working memory model. In this model, a statedriven forward sequence and a goal-driven backward sequence on the associative network are respectively represented by a sequence of synchronous firing in a particular gamma subcycle during a theta oscillation. These forward and backward sequence firings are transmi...

This paper describes the early experience of the Health Insurance Plan of California (the HIPC), a small-employer purchasing cooperative established in 1993. The plan's experience is consistent with the predictions of advocates of market-oriented health care reform: The program's design has encouraged cost-conscious choice by enrollees, which in turn has generated price competition among plans....

Introduction T he U.S. Congress created the Medicare+Choice (M+C) program in 1997 through the Balanced Budget Act (BBA) to broaden opportunities for elderly Americans to enroll in managed care.The architects of the program hoped that expanded plan choice would increase efficiency and lower costs by sparking competition among plans. Currently, about 5.6 million people, or 14 percent of the natio...

New regulation of health insurance markets creates multiple levels of health plans, with designations like "Gold" and "Silver." The underlying rationale for the heavy-metal approach to insurance regulation is that heterogeneity in demand for health care is not only due to health status (sick demand more than the healthy) but also to other, "taste" related factors (rich demand more than the poor...