Medicare spending for home health services has grown at an unprecedented rate since regulations were revised in 1989. To address the implications of this striking growth, it is necessary to examine the causes. This paper finds that the most important source of growth has been in the number of home health visits received per beneficiary, not in the number of beneficiaries that have been added in...

Recently, Baseri et al. proposed a secure untraceable off-line electronic cash system. They claimed that their scheme could achieve security requirements of an e-cash system such as, untraceability, anonymity, unlinkability, double spending checking, un-forgeability, date-attachability, and prevent forging coins. They further prove the un-forgeability security feature by using the hardness of d...

Recently, Fan et al. proposed a user efficient recoverable off-line e-cash scheme with fast anonymity revoking. They claimed that their scheme could achieve security requirements of an e-cash system such as, anonymity, unlinkability, double spending checking, anonymity control, and rapid anonymity revoking on double spending. They further formally prove the unlinkability and the un-forgeability...

In 1987, the Health Care Financing Administration proposed adding capital cost reimbursement to the prospective payment system. A data base was developed from which an index was calculated to adjust for geographic variation in construction cost. Findings from the data base, along with a description of trends in health care facility construction from 1970 through 1986, are presented. Spending (i...

The health reform plan put forth by Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) focuses on expanding insurance coverage and provides new subsidies to individuals, small businesses, and businesses experiencing catastrophic expenses. It greatly increases the federal regulation of private insurance but does not address the core economic incentives that drive health care spending. This omission along with the very su...

In this article, we estimate expenditures by businesses, households, and governments in providing financing for health care for 1987-2000 and track measures of burden that these costs impose. Although burden measures for businesses and the Federal Government have stabilized or improved since 1993, measures of burden for State and local governments are deteriorating slightly--a situation that is...

The authors are with the Office of the Actuary, Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA). The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of HCFA. This regular feature of the journal includes a discussion of recent trends in health care spending, employment, and prices. The statistics presented in this article are valuable in their own right and for under...

An entrepreneur shares business risk with the investors providing capital for her firm. Risk sharing is per se beneficial, but also results in an agency problem from diminished incentives entrepreneur. This classical trade-off depends on financial contracting between and financier. As alternative to debt or equity, we consider musharaka financing, Islamic profit loss contract. First, show that ...

Introduction Most developed countries use case-mix systems (APRDRG-type) to define the prospective budgets of their hospitals. However, these case-mix systems are based mainly on the main diagnosis and procedures and do not take into account the specificity of geriatric patients. In the present study, we use all geriatric tools (RAI, RUGs, RIM, etc.) to evaluate the needs of acute geriatric hos...

BACKGROUND Implementing initiatives to achieve the targets of MDG 5 requires sufficient financial resources that are mobilized and utilized in an equitable, efficient and sustainable manner. Informed decision making to this end requires the availability of reliable health financing information. This is accomplished by means of Reproductive Health (RH) sub-account, which captures and organizes e...