This paper explores options for reforming Medicare cost sharing in an effort to provide better financial protection for those beneficiaries with the greatest health care needs. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS), we consider how unified annual deductibles, alternative coinsurance rates, and a limit on out-of-pocket spending w...

High copayments for medical services can cause patients to underuse essential therapies. Value-based health insurance design attempts to address this problem by explicitly linking cost sharing and value. Copayments are set at low levels for high-value services. The Mercer National Survey of Employer-Sponsored Health Plans demonstrates that value-based insurance design use is increasing and that...

D espite the " 3 by 5 " initiative [1], which aims to treat 3 million people with antiretrovirals (ARVs) by the end of 2005, access to ARVs in resource-poor settings remains limited. Moreover, in some ARV-access programmes, free ARVs are provided only, or preferentially, to patients who are ARV naive. Treatment restricted to patients who are ARV naive was initially the case in Uganda, with the ...

This research evaluates the potential gains in benefits from using Goal Programming to preserve forestland. Twoand three-dimensional Goal Programming models are developed and applied to data from applicants to the U.S. Forest Service’s Forest Legacy Program, the largest forest protection program in the United States. Results suggest that not only do these model yield substantial increases in be...

A cost-sharing problem is defined by a set of players vying to receive some good or service, and a cost function describing the cost incurred by the auctioneer as a function of the set of winners. A costsharing mechanism is a protocol that decides which players win the auction and at what prices. Three desirable but provably mutually incompatible properties of a cost-sharing mechanism are: ince...

This paper studies a decentralized supply chain in which a manufacturer sells a common generic product through two traditional and online retailers under free riding market. We assume that the traditional retailer provides the value added services but the online retailer does not. Factors such as retail prices, local advertising of the retailers, global advertising of the manufacturer and servi...

This paper presents a coalitional game for value sharing in energy communities (ECs). It is proved that the super-additive, and grand coalition effectively increases global payoff. also model balanced thus, it has nonempty core. means there always exists at least one mechanism makes stable. Therefore, prosumers will achieve lower bills if they join to form larger ECs. A counterexample presented...

Proponents of health savings accounts (HSAs) contend that they will reduce medical expenditures. In practice, however, the effect of HSAs, and the high-deductible health plans that must accompany them, will depend on the actual provisions of those plans and of the plans they replace. We show that typical plans in the market today already contain substantial cost sharing. We find that many HSA/h...

Medicare Coverage of Anesthesia Services During Screening Colonoscopies for Patients at LowRisk of Sedation-Related Complications In 2014, theCenters forMedicare&Medicaid Serviceswaived patient cost sharing for anesthesia services during screening colonoscopies.1 The current professional guidelines recommend that sedation be provided by the gastroenterologist-nurse team; a separate anesthesiolo...