The authors describe an approach to primary prevention in which indirect services are redefined to include community services aimed at promoting mental health and preventing emotional and mental disorders. At the Peninsula Hospital Community Mental Health Center such services are family-focused and include consultation, education, collaboration with other agencies, and early intervention with c...

This issue brief is part of a continuing series of policy papers published by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's State Coverage Initiatives program, housed at AcademyHealth, and the National Academy for State Health Policy on the state health policy implications of ERISA's preemption clause.1 The purpose of the brief is to explore the U.S. Supreme Court's June 2004 decision that ERISA preempt...

Maintenance is crucial to ensuring and improving system dependability: By performing timely inspections, repairs, and renewals the lifespan and reliability of systems can be significantly improved. Good maintenance planning, however, has to balance these improvements against the downsides of maintenance, such as costs and planned downtime. In this paper, we study the effect of different mainten...

This paper chal lenges the widely c i t e d f inding of Groeneveld, Hannan, and Tuma t h a t the Seattle-Denver Income Maintenance Experiment provides evidence t h a t guaranteed income plans f o r poor husband-w i f e fami l i e s w i 11 inc rease mar i ta l d i s so lu t ions . The conclusion of t h i s paper i s t ha t the plans ( s p e c i f i c a l l y , the negat ive income tax plans in t...

Joint optimization models were developed combining group preventive maintenance of a series system and production scheduling. In this paper, we propose a joint optimization model to minimize the total cost including production cost, preventive maintenance cost, minimal repair cost for unexpected failures and tardiness cost. The total cost depends on both the production process and the machine m...

Efficiency dictates that plans for large-scale distributed activities be revised incrementally, with parts of plans being revised only if the expected utility of identifying and revising the subplans improves on the expected utility of using the original plan. The problems of identifying and reconsidering the subplans affected by changed circumstances or goals are closely related to the problem...

Oxford Health Plans, Inc. is a managed care organization whose goal is to deliver cost-effective, high-quality health care. Oxford’s product lines include traditional health maintenance organizations, point-of service plans, third-party administration of employer funded benefit plans, Medicare and Medicaid plans, and dental plans. A Member’s satisfaction with their Primary Care Physician (PCP) ...

CONTEXT Although unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) are considerable problems in the United States, private health insurance plans are inconsistent in their coverage of reproductive and sexual health services needed to address these problems. METHODS A survey administered to a market-representative sample of 12 health insurance carriers in Washington State assessed ...

INTRODUCTION In the United States, tobacco use is the leading preventable cause of death and disease. The health and cost consequences of tobacco dependence have made treatment and prevention of tobacco use a key priority among multiple stakeholders, including health plans, insurers, providers, employers, and policymakers. In 2002, the third survey of tobacco control practices and policies in h...