Managed care is now the norm for many on Medicaid, with approximately 19 million people on Medicaid enrolled in health maintenance organizations. In 2005, nearly 300 plans nationwide participated in state Medicaid managed care programs, with many of those plans operating under for-profit ownership. Concerns about the impact of plan ownership on access to care arise because of differences in the...

This article assesses the participation and the financial performance of licensed health maintenance organization (HMOs) in the Medicaid market. The study found that participation by Medicaid Dominant plans has more than doubled from 11 percent in 1992 to 23 percent in 1998 while Medicaid membership in Commercial Dominant plans declined from 71 percent in 1994 to 51 percent in 1998. Both partic...

The Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Authority has recently undertaken a program of analysing the routine maintenance completed on its main generation and hydraulic assets. Power industry deregulation and increasing competition have created the need to reduce costs while increasing productivity. Along with downsizing and organisational restructuring, considerable effort has been placed on improvi...

Power transformers provide a vital link between the generation and distribution of produced energy. Such static equipment is subjected to abuse during operation in generation and distribution stations and leads to catastrophic failures. This paper reviewed the techniques in the field of condition monitoring of power transformers in recent years. Transformer monitoring and diagnosis are the effe...

Planning algorithms have traditionally been geared toward achievement goals in single-agent environments. Such algorithms essentially produce plans to reach one of a specified set of states. More general approaches for planning based on temporal logic (TL) are emerging. Current approaches tend to use linear TL, and can handle sets of sequences of states. However, they assume deterministic actio...

Medicare Advantage (MA) enrollment has changed dramatically in 2011 as enrollment has shifted from private fee-for-service (PFFS) plans into preferred provider organization (PPO) plans. PFFS plans dominated the growth of the rural MA market from 2005 to 2010; however, a significant number of PFFS plans have left the market due to legislative changes that required plans to provide protections fo...

Ten years after the passage of the HMO Act, health maintenance organizations represent a small proportion of employee health plans; benefits are more comprehensive and worker premiums higher than for traditional insurance, but other variables make comparisons difficult.

Key Data Findings. (1) The average rural Medicare Advantage (MA) plan enrollee in 2012 experienced a quality rating of 3.60 stars (of a potential 5.0), compared with a rating of 3.71 stars experienced by urban enrollees. (2) The measured rural-urban difference in the MA plan quality is a result of the difference in the composition of the enrollment and plan availability in MA markets, rather th...