Over the horizon: YouTube culture meets Australian screen culture

This chapter looks over the horizon - at a major emerging global dynamic in screen culture in which Australia is beginning to be embedded. This nascent screen ecology is being shaped by a set of increasingly global online screen entertainment platforms, most prominently Google/YouTube, Apple, Amazon and Netflix. The chapter focuses on how Australia fits into the explosive growth of arguably the most challenging and innovative element of this new screen ecology: a very low-budget tier of advertising-supported online channels driven mainly by the professionalisation and monetisation of previously amateur content creation. This part of the ecology consists predominantly of previously amateur creators, using platforms such as YouTube, to develop subscriber/fan bases of significant size. These bases are always transnational in composition, often generating, as a consequence, significant advertising and sponsorship revenue and, increasingly, the attention of mainstream media.</p

Perverse Incentives in the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit

This paper analyzes some of the perverse incentives that may arise under the current Medicare prescription drug benefit design. In particular, risk adjustment for a standalone prescription drug benefit creates perverse incentives for prescription drug plans when making coverage decisions and/or for pharmaceutical companies when setting prices. This problem is new in that it does not arise with risk adjustment for other types of health care coverage. For this and other reasons, Medicare's drug benefit requires especially close regulatory oversight, now and in the future. We also consider a relatively minor change in financing the benefit that could lead to significant changes in how the benefit functions. In particular, if all plans were required to charge the same premium, there would be less diversity in quality, but also less need to regulate formulary composition, less budgetary uncertainty, and less upward pressure on drug prices