Bidding has been proposed to replace or complement the administered prices that Medicare pays to hospitals and health plans. In 2006, the Medicare Advantage program implemented a competitive bidding system to determine plan payments. In perfectly competitive models, plans bid their costs and thus bids are insensitive to the benchmark. Under many other models of competition, bids respond to chan...

OBJECTIVES To compute a benchmark for tracking readmission rates among patients enrolled in Medicare's private comprehensive Medicare Advantage (MA) plans and to develop preliminary comparisons with the fee-for-service (FFS) readmission rates. STUDY DESIGN Descriptive data presentation with analytic discussion. METHODS We computed a benchmark for rehospitalization rates among MA patients us...

BACKGROUND Some retired racing Greyhounds (RRG) that undergo surgery bleed excessively. HYPOTHESIS Greyhounds that bleed excessively will have one or more preoperative hemostatic abnormalities that can be used to predict the risk and severity of postoperative bleeding. ANIMALS Eighty-eight RRG undergoing ovariohysterectomy or castration. METHODS All dogs were evaluated preoperatively with...

This dissertation proposes an Optimality-Theoretic [OT] (Prince and Smolensky 1993) account of case systems and explores its typological scope, with a particular focus on four accusative languages, Korean, Japanese, Icelandic, and Imbabura Quechua. There are three major claims to be made here. First, the typological variation of case systems is derived from re-ranking of a small number of indiv...