A variety of economic factors have created a growing demand for health care reform and the rapid expansion of managed care plans. Absence of a clear, commonly accepted definition of managed care constitutes one of the major difficulties in constructing a useful dialogue about managed care and its likely effects. This paper defines basic managed care models and outlines for each the degree of fi...

Introduction A key part of Australia’s national health reform policy is to implement activity-based funding (ABF) for public hospitals from 1st July 2012. The Council of Australian Governments (COAG) established the Health Reform Implementation Group (HRIG) to oversee the execution of the reforms. HRIG, in turn, created an ABF Sub Group to advise on implementing ABF. The HRIG ABF Sub Group esta...

This is the first Innovations in Value-Based Approaches to Diabetes Care Issue Brief, a series by the American Association of Preferred Provider Organizations (AAPPO). This Issue Brief examines how 2010 health care reform legislation incorporated the current benefit trend of Value-Based Insurance Design (VBID), and the potential for VBID approaches to improve care of one of the Nation’s leading...

BACKGROUND As healthcare spending continues to increase, medical insurance is now under great pressure of growing economic burden. To control the excessive growth of medical expenditure, change of medical payment system was clearly put forward in China's new healthcare reform. With this end, Tianjin, a large city in North China, is now exploring to replace traditional fee-for-service (FFS) with...

The Cost Control paper argues that health care reform proposals without serious cost controls will fail both as policy and politically. Most of the agenda being discussed in current debate has already been judged by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO 2008) as unlikely to yield significant savings within the necessary time frame. That paper reviews both the compelling reasons for doubt about r...

While Congress has actually taken little action on health care reform, there has been no shortage of discussion on Capitol Hill. This year alone Congress has considered more than 100 bills on health care that range from two pages to more than 200 pages. In addition, the Bush administration released a 94-page outline of its health care reform program. President-elect Bill Clinton also has a heal...

In response to the existing undersupply of physical therapists and the projected changes of the health care reform era, it is prudent for the profession to consider implementing a training strategy that would bring the supply of physical therapists in line with requirements. Before such a training strategy could be developed, however, the physical therapy community would need to produce a requi...

The paper discusses the Russian power sector reform plan, approved by the government in July 2001, which outlines the framework for competition and changes in ownership structure. The paper focuses on the following issues related to the plan: restructuring of regional energos and large generating companies; restructuring of transmission and system operation; the mechanism for introducing compet...

BACKGROUND In recent years use of family physicians has been determined as a start point of health system reform to achieve more productive health services. In this study we aimed to assess the cost-efficiency of the implementation of this plan in Fars province, southern Iran. METHODS This cross-sectional descriptive study was done in 2007 in 18 provincial health centers as well as 224 rural ...