Healthcare Reforms in Bulgaria: Towards Diagnosis and Prescription

The paper studies the policy response to the market failures and challenges of healthcare in transition. Bulgaria chose a halfway shift from healthcare services provided entirely by the state to a system with private providers of outpatient services and public providers of inpatient services, both sectors financed mainly by state-run compulsory payroll insurance system. The paper shows the evolution of this reform path to low compliance by both customers (contributors) and service-providers (contractors with the National Health Insurance Fund), which leads to excessive regulations and control, and crowding out of the private sector. The outcome is a system that is increasingly driven by administrative controls at the expense of market incentives. Based on this analysis it identifies the relevant policy implications and opportunities for moving the stalled health reforms out of the institutional impasse.healthcare reform

Spartan Daily, May 22, 1974

Volume 62, Issue 59https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/5883/thumbnail.jp

Predicting the cost of the consequences of a large nuclear accident in the UK

Nuclear accidents have the potential to lead to significant off-site effects that require actions to minimise the radiological impacts on people. Such countermeasures may include sheltering, evacuation, restrictions on the sale of locally-grown food, and long-term relocation of the population amongst others. Countries with nuclear facilities draw up emergency preparedness plans, and put in place such provisions as distributing instructions and iodine prophylaxis to the local population. Their plans are applied in simulated exercises on a regular basis. The costs associated with emergency preparedness and the safety provisions to reduce the likelihood of an accident, and/or mitigate the consequences, are justified on the basis of the health risks and accident costs averted. There is, of course, only limited actual experience to indicate the likely costs so that much of the costing of accidents is based on calculations. This paper reviews the methodologies used, in particular the approach that has been developed in the UK, to appraise the costs of a hypothetical nuclear accident. Results of analysing a hypothetical nuclear accident at a fictitious reactor site within the United Kingdom are discussed in relation to the accidents at Three Mile Island 2, Chernobyl and Fukushima Dai-ichi

Controlling Venereal Disease in Orlando during World War II

Beryl Oates* was nineteen years old when Deputy Sheriff James Allen Black arrested her just after 10:00 am on a Saturday morning in February 1944 on suspicion of having a venereal disease. She was detained until she could be seen by Doctor and Captain Solomon Kolack who worked for the US Public Health Service as the disease control officer for Orange County, Florida. When he saw her, Kolack would have tested Beryl for syphilis and, if she tested positive, she would have probably been confined in the rapid treatment center in Ocala for a lengthy and painful course of arsenic injections. Under the provisions of a new state health law, she could be held for three to five days by the police without habeas corpus and then, if infected, sent to the State Hospital at Ocala for treatment until cured. Without the money to hire her own doctor, and because she was a black woman living under the caste system of Jim Crow, she would have had little recourse to prevent this high-handed treatment.

2006 Scholar\u27s Day Program

Scholars\u27 Day was established in 1997 and is a day-long conference devoted to showcasing the wide array of scholarship, research and creative activities occurring on campus. In 2012, a new emphasis on student research lead to a name change to Transformations: A Student Research and Creativity Conference. This event focuses on student research, which is defined as an original investigation or creative activity through the primary efforts of a student or group of students. The work should show problem-solving skills and demonstrate new conceptual outcomes.https://digitalcommons.cortland.edu/transformationsprograms/1016/thumbnail.jp

IPOs and the Slow Death of Section 5

Since its enactment, Section 5 of the Securities Act of 1933 has restricted sales-based communications with investors, but that effort is nearly dead even with respect to the most sensitive of offerings, the IPO. Our paper traces that devolution, which began almost as soon as the ’33 Act came into existence, though the SEC’s 2005 deregulatory reforms and Congress’ intervention in the JOBS Act of 2012. We show how much of this related to an embrace of “book-building” as the industry’s preferred method of price discovery, which requires private two-way communications between underwriters and potential sophisticated investors. But book-building (and the predictable IPO underpricing that results) has a retail dimension as well, and we point to ways in which the otherwise sensible deregulation may enable an over-stimulation of retail investor demand. We then explore two main justifications that have been given for the aggressive deregulation. The first is that any loss in prophylactic protection can be made up for by the threat of liability, particularly with an enhanced Section 12(a)(2). We find this unpersuasive for a variety of reasons. The other—amply visible in the long history of Section 5—is a faith in the “filtration” process, that retail investors gain protection because of the availability of the preliminary prospectus during the waiting period, to those involved in the selling process if not the investors themselves. Putting aside the biased incentives that affect filtration, much of what is most important—and conveyed privately to the institutions in the course of book-building—is forward-looking information that probably need not appear in the formal disclosure, whether preliminary or final. None of this is an argument for returning to the old prophylactics of Section 5. But it is cause for the SEC and FINRA to pay close attention to the retail investor effects of the IPO selling practices, especially in the post-JOBS Act era