Distributive Injustice(s) in American Health Care

Havighurst and Richman seek to show the nature--and to suggest the cumulative attitude--of the many regressive tendencies of the financing, regulatory and legal regime governing the private side of US health care

Who Pays? Who Benefits? Unfairness in American Health Care

American-style health insurance greatly amplifies price-gouging opportunities for health care providers, who inflate prices both to enrich themselves and to subsidize and expand the nation’s health care enterprise. To the extent that lower- and middle-income Americans with private health coverage pay premiums that go to support and expand the system, they are subject to an unfair (regressive) “head tax” levied by unaccountable entities for ostensibly public but also private purposes. Lower-income premium payers also often pay for costly health coverage designed to suit the economic interests and values of professional and other elites rather than their own. They also appear to get less as a group out of their employers’ health plans than their higher-income coworkers. How the cost burdens and benefits of Americans’ health care are distributed has not been sufficiently recognized as the fundamental issue of social justice that it is - even after the major reform legislation of 2010

Secret-Sharing for NP

A computational secret-sharing scheme is a method that enables a dealer, that has a secret, to distribute this secret among a set of parties such that a "qualified" subset of parties can efficiently reconstruct the secret while any "unqualified" subset of parties cannot efficiently learn anything about the secret. The collection of "qualified" subsets is defined by a Boolean function. It has been a major open problem to understand which (monotone) functions can be realized by a computational secret-sharing schemes. Yao suggested a method for secret-sharing for any function that has a polynomial-size monotone circuit (a class which is strictly smaller than the class of monotone functions in P). Around 1990 Rudich raised the possibility of obtaining secret-sharing for all monotone functions in NP: In order to reconstruct the secret a set of parties must be "qualified" and provide a witness attesting to this fact. Recently, Garg et al. (STOC 2013) put forward the concept of witness encryption, where the goal is to encrypt a message relative to a statement "x in L" for a language L in NP such that anyone holding a witness to the statement can decrypt the message, however, if x is not in L, then it is computationally hard to decrypt. Garg et al. showed how to construct several cryptographic primitives from witness encryption and gave a candidate construction. One can show that computational secret-sharing implies witness encryption for the same language. Our main result is the converse: we give a construction of a computational secret-sharing scheme for any monotone function in NP assuming witness encryption for NP and one-way functions. As a consequence we get a completeness theorem for secret-sharing: computational secret-sharing scheme for any single monotone NP-complete function implies a computational secret-sharing scheme for every monotone function in NP

The complex links between governance and biodiversity

We argue that two problems weaken the claims of those who link corruption and the exploitation of natural resources. The first is conceptual. Studies that use national level indicators of corruption fail to note that corruption comes in many forms, at multiple levels, and may or may not affect resource use. Without a clear causal model of the mechanism by which corruption affects resources, one should treat with caution any estimated relationship between corruption and the state of natural resources. The second problem is methodological: Simple models linking corruption measures and natural resource use typically do not account for other important causes and control variables pivotal to the relationship between humans and natural resources. By way of illustration of these two general concerns, we demonstrate that the findings of a well known recent study that posits a link between corruption and decreases in forests, elephants, and rhinoceros are fragile to simple conceptual and methodological refinements.Environmental Economics and Policy,

Who Pays - Who Benefits - Unfairness in American Health Care

In several ways, traditional health care financing has long been unfair to middle- and lower-income insureds. A major problem is monopoly pricing of many services and goods. Although the point is seldom recognized, American-style health insurance greatly aggravates the redistributive effects of monopoly by weakening the usual constraints on sellers\u27 pricing freedom. Moreover, lucrative monopoly is often tolerated as an expedient instrument of public finance through which seemingly desirable spending on health care or health-related innovation is financed by the equivalent of an unfair head tax on individuals with private coverage. Other underappreciated unfairnesses are specific to employer-sponsored health coverage and to the distorted incentives and perceptions spawned by the tax subsidy encouraging it. Because employer-sponsored coverage effectively hides premium costs from the employee-voters who ultimately bear them, middle- and lower-income employees regularly bear the unjustifiably high and uncontrolled costs of health coverage designed principally to accommodate the values and economic interests of the health care industry and other elites. These same consumers also appear to get less, as a group, out of their employers\u27 health plans than their higher-income coworkers, despite bearing equivalent premium costs. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act does little to alter the framework of employer-sponsored coverage and thus represents a missed opportunity to rectify its unfairness to the working class. Although the law\u27s main purpose is to ensure that nearly all individuals either have employer coverage or procure essential health benefits through an Exchange, it defines the latter new entitlement in such a way as to perpetuate, not correct, the distortions engendered by the tax subsidy. In addition, the new law not only has no answer for the provider monopoly problem but is likely to increase wealth transfers from consumers to providers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR

Who Pays - Who Benefits - Unfairness in American Health Care

In several ways, traditional health care financing has long been unfair to middle- and lower-income insureds. A major problem is monopoly pricing of many services and goods. Although the point is seldom recognized, American-style health insurance greatly aggravates the redistributive effects of monopoly by weakening the usual constraints on sellers\u27 pricing freedom. Moreover, lucrative monopoly is often tolerated as an expedient instrument of public finance through which seemingly desirable spending on health care or health-related innovation is financed by the equivalent of an unfair head tax on individuals with private coverage. Other underappreciated unfairnesses are specific to employer-sponsored health coverage and to the distorted incentives and perceptions spawned by the tax subsidy encouraging it. Because employer-sponsored coverage effectively hides premium costs from the employee-voters who ultimately bear them, middle- and lower-income employees regularly bear the unjustifiably high and uncontrolled costs of health coverage designed principally to accommodate the values and economic interests of the health care industry and other elites. These same consumers also appear to get less, as a group, out of their employers\u27 health plans than their higher-income coworkers, despite bearing equivalent premium costs. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act does little to alter the framework of employer-sponsored coverage and thus represents a missed opportunity to rectify its unfairness to the working class. Although the law\u27s main purpose is to ensure that nearly all individuals either have employer coverage or procure essential health benefits through an Exchange, it defines the latter new entitlement in such a way as to perpetuate, not correct, the distortions engendered by the tax subsidy. In addition, the new law not only has no answer for the provider monopoly problem but is likely to increase wealth transfers from consumers to providers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR

Secret Evidence and the Due Process of Terrorist Detentions

Courts across many common law democracies have been wrestling with a shared predicament: proving cases against suspected terrorists in detention hearings requires governments to protect sensitive classified information about intelligence sources and methods, but withholding evidence from suspects threatens fairness and contradicts a basic tenet of adversarial process. This Article examines several models for resolving this problem, including the special advocate model employed by Britain and Canada, and the \u27Judicial management model employed in Israel. This analysis shows how the very different approaches adopted even among democracies sharing common legal foundations reflect varying understandings of \u27fundamental fairness or due process, and their effectiveness in each system depends on the special institutional features of each national court system. This Article examines the secret evidence dilemma in a manner relevant to forseeable reforms in the United States, as courts and Congress wrestle with questions left open by Boumediene v. Bush

Distributive Injustice(s) in American Health Care

Syftet med denna uppsats var att genom kvalitativa djupintervjuer av chefer och medarbetare studera, beskriva och förstå fenomenet utvecklingssamtal. Undersökningen genomfördes i en medelstor svensk försvarsindustri enligt en fenomenologiskt inspirerarad metodik. För att analysera studiens resultat utvecklades ett teoretiskt ramverk baserat på förväntansteori, moderna psykologiskakontraktoch Maslows behovshierarki. Studien visade att utvecklingssamtal fyller flera behov och har potential att öka medarbetarnas trivsel, engagemang och motivation. På motsvarande sätt kan dock utvecklingssamtal även skapa missnöje och sänka motivation om dess resultat upplevs som ett brott mot de informella psykologiska kontrakt som återfinns på arbetsplatsen. Det är därför mycket viktigt att moderna kunskapsorganisationer försöker hitta rätt former för utvecklingssamtal och därmed skapar förutsättningar för engagemang och motivation bland sina medarbetare

Illusory Percepts from Auditory Adaptation

Phenomena resembling tinnitus and Zwicker phantom tone are seen to result from an auditory gain adaptation mechanism that attempts to make full use of a fixed-capacity channel. In the case of tinnitus, the gain adaptation enhances internal noise of a frequency band otherwise silent due to damage. This generates a percept of a phantom sound as a consequence of hearing loss. In the case of Zwicker tone, a frequency band is temporarily silent during the presentation of a notched broad-band sound, resulting in a percept of a tone at the notched frequency. The model suggests a link between tinnitus and the Zwicker tone percept, in that it predicts different results for normal and tinnitus subjects due to a loss of instantaneous nonlinear compression. Listening experiments on 44 subjects show that tinnitus subjects (11 of 44) are significantly more likely to hear the Zwicker tone. This psychoacoustic experiment establishes the first empirical link between the Zwicker tone percept and tinnitus. Together with the modeling results, this supports the hypothesis that the phantom percept is a consequence of a central adaptation mechanism confronted with a degraded sensory apparatus