Silicon (Si) serves as bioactive beneficial element. Si is highly abundant in soil, and occurs ubiquitously in all organisms including plants and humans. During the last three decades, nutritional significance of Si for plant and human health has received increasing attention. Plant Si plays a pivotal role in growth and development, and this beneficial effect depends usually on accumulation in ...

OBJECTIVES To demonstrate a threat to validity in using claims-based risk tools with chronically ill, underinsured populations. STUDY DESIGN We tracked disease burden of high-risk pool beneficiaries with potentially disabling health conditions receiving enhanced health insurance benefits through a federally funded research demonstration. At baseline, beneficiaries paid high premiums and cost ...

Seeking to redress health disparities across income and race, many policy-makers mandate health insurance benefits, presuming that equalized benefits will help equalize use of beneficial health services. This paper tests that presumption by measuring health care use by a diverse population with comprehensive health insurance. Focusing on use of mental health care and pharmaceuticals, it finds t...

We develop a simple yet realistic model of income insurance, where the individual’s ability and willingness to work is treated as a continuous variable. In this framework, income insurance not only provides income smoothing, it also relieves the individual from particularly burdensome work. As a result, the individual adjusts his labor supply in a continuous fashion to the implicit tax wedge of...

Sickness Absence and Local Benefit Cultures In many countries, sickness absence financed by generous insurance benefits has become an important concern in the policy debate. It turns out that there are strong variations in absence behavior between local geographical areas, and it has been difficult to explain these variations by observable socioeconomic factors. In this paper we investigate whe...

This Issue Brief provides background information on the employment-based health insurance system and its alternatives. The report discusses the advantages and disadvantages of the current employment-based health insurance system, the current tax treatment of health insurance, and the strength and weaknesses of recent proposals to introduce tax credits. It presents findings from the public opini...

BACKGROUND Equitable utilization of health care is a primary goal of the Chinese health system. This study aimed to examine horizontal inequity in health care utilization and identify the factors resulting in inequity among the middle-aged and elderly in China. METHODS The data were obtained from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS). We employed the concentration index ...

We use a Canadian survey of the unemployed to examine how household expenditures after a job loss respond to the level of income replacement provided by UI. We isolate a liquidity constraint or ‘transitory income’ effect from the ‘permanent income’ shock of job loss, and from the costs of working. We find significant effects of varying the replacement ratio among the third of the sample who did...

There is growing evidence to suggest that exposure to natural environments can be associated with mental health benefits. Proximity to greenspace has been associated with lower levels of stress (Thompson et al., 2012) and reduced symptomology for depression and anxiety (Beyer et al., 2014), while interacting with nature can improve cognition for children with attention deficits (Taylor and Kuo,...

McPheeters et al1 provided a systematic review of the evidence thatwas used by theUSPreventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) to make its recent recommendations on universal autism screening.2 The USPSTF concluded that there is currently insufficientevidenceto assess the benefits of universal screening for autismspectrumdisorder (ASD) inyoung children. Inparticular, theUSPSTFnoted that no studyha...