july 2017 IZA DP No. 10917 Taking the CON out of Pennsylvania: Did Hip and Knee Replacement Patients Benefit?* Policymakers and the general public have expressed increasing concern over rising health care costs. The Certificate-of-Need (CON) programs began at the federal level in 1974 to stem the increase in costs by limiting hospital expansion and acquisition of equipment. The federal requirem...

A replacement model is presented for a productive asset subject to stochastic input decay, tax allowances due to a deterministic depreciation variable, and a fixed investment cost. The risk neutral valuation function is formulated and optimal trigger levels signalling replacement for the two factors is determined analytically although not as a closed-form solution. We demonstrate that the opera...

Unicompartmental knee arthroplasty (UKA) is appropriate for one in four patients with osteoarthritic knees. This study was performed to compare the safety, effectiveness and economic viability of a new accelerated protocol with current standard care in a state healthcare system. A single blind RCT design was used. Eligible patients were screened for NSAID tolerance, social circumstances and geo...

The cost of the inpatient stay for a typical aortic valve replacement and for an oesophagectomy were determined by recording and costing every aspect of the patients' care from admission until discharge. This method of cost calculation was found to be satisfactory and could be used by other centres to allow comparisons between hospitals or countries. At St Thomas's Hospital in 1977 the cost of ...

The cell formation (CF) is one of the most important steps in the design of a cellular manufacturing system (CMS), which it includes machines’ grouping in cells and part grouping as separate families, so that the costs are minimized. The various aspects of the problem should be considered in a CF. The machine reliability and the tool assigned to them are the most important problems which have t...

Our objective was to assess the cost-benefit of enhancing or replacing the conventional sputum smear with the real-time PCR Xpert MTB/RIF method in the inpatient diagnostic schema for tuberculosis (TB).Recent data from published per-case cost studies for TB/multidrug-resistant (MDR)-TB and from comparative analyses of sputum microscopy, mycobacterial culture, Xpert MTB/RIF and drug susceptibili...