Executive Authority to Reform Health: Options and Limitations

Presidential power has provoked increasingly vigorous debate since the turn of this century. In recent years, scholars and lawyers have been grappling with how Congress\u27s dictates may limit the President\u27s Commander-in-Chief power to detain enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay, to fight wars abroad, and to conduct intelligence activities at home. But policymakers have not yet explored the many possibilities for invoking the President\u27s Take Care power to change health care policy. This paper explores the scope and limits of President Barack Obama\u27s ability to invoke his executive authority to reform health care. Specifically, it identifies ways the Obama Administration can use directives to: (1) expand Medicaid and SCHIP coverage through section 1115 waivers; (2) test quality initiatives through Medicare demonstration authority; (3) expand health information technology; (4) allow drug reimportation and experiment with contracting power under Medicare; (5) enhance patient protections and private coverage requirements; (6) lift coverage restrictions on Medicaid and SCHIP; and (7) build on the health insurance program for federal employees. Consistent with the mission of the Legal Solutions in Health Reform project, this paper does not endorse a particular policy. Instead of recommending what, it explains how

Legal Solutions in Health Reform: Executive Authority to Reform Health: Options and Limitations

Examines which healthcare reforms the president can implement without congressional approval and how. Identifies options for promoting and directing agency actions on specific policy goals, as well as legal, budgetary, and legislative constraints

Ants constructing rule-based classifiers.

Classifiers; Data; Data mining; Studies;

The Purpose and Limits of Social Health Insurance

This contribution seeks to answer two related questions. First, what is the purpose of social health insurance? Or put in slightly different terms, what are the reasons for social (or public) health insurance to exist, even to dominate private health insurance in most developed countries? And second, what are the limits of social health insurance? Can one say that there is "too much" social health insurance in the following two senses: Should the balance be shifted towards the private alternative? And is the degree of coverage excessive?social health insurance, private health insurance, insurance coverage

Semi-automatic fault localization

One of the most expensive and time-consuming components of the debugging process is locating the errors or faults. To locate faults, developers must identify statements involved in failures and select suspicious statements that might contain faults. In practice, this localization is done by developers in a tedious and manual way, using only a single execution, targeting only one fault, and having a limited perspective into a large search space. The thesis of this research is that fault localization can be partially automated with the use of commonly available dynamic information gathered from test-case executions in a way that is effective, efficient, tolerant of test cases that pass but also execute the fault, and scalable to large programs that potentially contain multiple faults. The overall goal of this research is to develop effective and efficient fault localization techniques that scale to programs of large size and with multiple faults. There are three principle steps performed to reach this goal: (1) Develop practical techniques for locating suspicious regions in a program; (2) Develop techniques to partition test suites into smaller, specialized test suites to target specific faults; and (3) Evaluate the usefulness and cost of these techniques. In this dissertation, the difficulties and limitations of previous work in the area of fault-localization are explored. A technique, called Tarantula, is presented that addresses these difficulties. Empirical evaluation of the Tarantula technique shows that it is efficient and effective for many faults. The evaluation also demonstrates that the Tarantula technique can loose effectiveness as the number of faults increases. To address the loss of effectiveness for programs with multiple faults, supporting techniques have been developed and are presented. The empirical evaluation of these supporting techniques demonstrates that they can enable effective fault localization in the presence of multiple faults. A new mode of debugging, called parallel debugging, is developed and empirical evidence demonstrates that it can provide a savings in terms of both total expense and time to delivery. A prototype visualization is provided to display the fault-localization results as well as to provide a method to interact and explore those results. Finally, a study on the effects of the composition of test suites on fault-localization is presented.Ph.D.Committee Chair: Harrold, Mary Jean; Committee Member: Orso, Alessandro; Committee Member: Pande, Santosh; Committee Member: Reiss, Steven; Committee Member: Rugaber, Spence