Reporting on Forecasts, Before the 85th Annual Meeting of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, October 3, 1972, Denver, Colorado

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/aicpa_assoc/1936/thumbnail.jp

Healthcare Price Transparency: Policy Approaches and Estimated Impacts on Spending

Healthcare price transparency discussions typically focus on increasing patients' access to information about their out-of-pocket costs, but that focus is too narrow and should include other audiences -- physicians, employers, health plans and policymakers -- each with distinct needs and uses for healthcare price information. Greater price transparency can reduce U.S. healthcare spending.For example, an estimated $100 billion could be saved over the next 10 years if three select interventions were undertaken. However, most of the projected savings come from making price information available to employers and physicians, according to an analysis by researchers at the former Center for Studying Health System Change (HSC). Based on the current availability and modest impact of plan-based transparency tools, requiring all private plans to provide personalized out-of-pocket price data to enrollees would reduce total health spending by an estimated$18 billion over the next decade. While $18 billion is a substantial dollar amount, it is less than a tenth of a percent of the$40 trillionin total projected health spending over the same period. In contrast, using state all-payer claims databases to gather and report hospital-specific prices might reduce spending by an estimated $61 billion over 10 years.The effects of price transparency depend critically on the intended audience, the decision-making context and how prices are presented. And the impact of price transparency can be greatly amplified if target audiences are able and motivated to act on the information. Simply providing prices is insufficient to control spending without other shifts in healthcare financing, including changes in benefit design to make patients more sensitive to price differences among providers and alternative treatments. Other reforms that can amplify the impact of price transparency include shifting from fee-for-service payments that reward providers for volume to payment methods that put providers at risk for spending for episodes of care or defined patient populations. While price transparency alone seems unlikely to transform the healthcare system, it can play a needed role in enabling effective reforms in value-based benefit design and provider payment

Nicolaus Copernicus, 1473-1973

Nicolaus Copernicus, 1473-1973 His Revolutions and His Revolution Catalogue of and Exhibition of Manuscripts and Books With an Historical Essay by Seymour L. Chapin Linderman Library, Lehigh University Bethlehem, Pennsylvania : September-November 197

Multilevel Examination of Facility Characteristics, Social Integration, and Health for Older Adults Living in Nursing Homes

Objectives. Testing a model based on past research and theory, this study assessed relationships between facility characteristics (i.e., culture change efforts, social workers) and residents’ social networks and social support across nursing homes and examined relationships between multiple aspects of social integration (i.e., social networks, social capital, social engagement, social support) and mental and functional health for older adults in nursing homes. Methods. Data were collected at nursing homes using a planned missing data design with random sampling techniques. Data collection occurred at the individual-level through in-person structured interviews with older adult nursing home residents (N = 140) and at the facility-level (N = 30) with nursing home staff. Results. The best fitting multilevel structural equation model indicated that the culture change sub-scale for relationships significantly predicted differences in residents’ social networks. Additionally, social networks had a positive indirect relationship with mental and functional health among residents primarily via social engagement. Social capital had a positive direct relationship with both health outcomes. Discussion. To predict better social integration and mental and functional health outcomes for nursing homes residents, study findings support prioritizing that close relationships exist among staff, residents, and the community as well as increased resident social engagement and social trust

High Angular Resolution Observations of Four Candidate BLAST High-Mass Starless Cores

We discuss high-angular resolution observations of ammonia toward four candidate high-mass starless cores (HMSCs). The cores were identified by the Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST) during its 2005 survey of the Vulpecula region where 60 compact sources were detected simultaneously at 250, 350, and 500 micron. Four of these cores, with no IRAS-PSC or MSX counterparts, were observed with the NRAO Very Large Array (VLA) in the NH3(1,1) and (2,2) spectral lines. Our observations indicate that the four cores are cold (Tk <~ 14K) and show a filamentary and/or clumpy structure. They also show a significant velocity substructure within ~1km/s. The four BLAST cores appear to be colder and more quiescent than other previously observed HMSC candidates, suggesting an earlier stage of evolution.Comment: Submitted to the Astrophysical Journal on January 22, 2010. Accepted for publication on April 15, 2010. The paper has 21 pages and 17 figures

Trade Study Analysis for TNS Tokamaks.

A series of parametric trade studies was performed to consistently evaluate the relative.costs and performance parameters of D-T burning tokamaks over a range of plasma sizes and toroidal field (TF) coil technologies. Four different types of TF coil technologies were investigated: water-cooled copper coils, superconducting NbTi and Nb{sub 3}Sn coils, and a &quot;hybrid&quot; coil arrangement consisting of a· normal conducting Cu coil nested within a superconducting NbTi coil. Results of the analysis indicate for TNS operation, for example, that for a given plasma beta at ignition, the Cu TF coil devices are least expensive, followed by the Nb{sub 3}Sn, NbTi, and NbTi/Cu options. Other conclusions and trends resulting from the study are presented and analyzed

Simulating the Performance of Large-Format Submillimetre Focal-Plane Arrays

A robust measurement of the clustering amplitude of the sub-mm population of starburst galaxies requires large-area surveys (>> 1 deg^2). The largest-format arrays subtend only 10 arcmin^2 on the sky and hence scan-mapping is a necessary observing mode. Providing realistic representations of the extragalactic sky and atmosphere, as the input to a detailed simulator of the telescope and instrument performance, allows important decisions to be made about the design of large-area fully-sampled surveys and observing strategies. In this paper we present preliminary simulations that include detector noise, time-constants and array geometry, telescope pointing errors, scan speeds and scanning angles, sky noise and sky rotation.Comment: 3 pages, 3 figures, Conference Contribution: 2K1BC Workshop "Experimental Cosmology at millimetre wavelengths", July 9-13 2001, Ital

Breaking the Redshift Deadlock - I: Constraining the star formation history of galaxies with sub-millimetre photometric redshifts

Future extragalactic sub-millimetre and millimetre surveys have the potential to provide a sensitive census of the level of obscured star formation in galaxies at all redshifts. While in general there is good agreement between the source counts from existing SCUBA (850um) and MAMBO (1.25mm) surveys of different depths and areas, it remains difficult to determine the redshift distribution and bolometric luminosities of the sub-millimetre and millimetre galaxy population. This is principally due to the ambiguity in identifying an individual sub-millimetre source with its optical, IR or radio counterpart which, in turn, prevents a confident measurement of the spectroscopic redshift. Additionally, the lack of data measuring the rest-frame FIR spectral peak of the sub-millimetre galaxies gives rise to poor constraints on their rest-frame FIR luminosities and star formation rates. In this paper we describe Monte-Carlo simulations of ground-based, balloon-borne and satellite sub-millimetre surveys that demonstrate how the rest-frame FIR-sub-millimetre spectral energy distributions (250-850um) can be used to derive photometric redshifts with an r.m.s accuracy of +/- 0.4 over the range 0 < z < 6. This opportunity to break the redshift deadlock will provide an estimate of the global star formation history for luminous optically-obscured galaxies [L(FIR) > 3 x 10^12 Lsun] with an accuracy of 20 per cent.Comment: 14 pages, 22 figures, submitted to MNRAS, replaced with accepted versio

Measured unsteady transonic aerodynamic characteristics of an elastic supercritical wing with an oscillating control surface

Transonic steady and unsteady aerodynamic data were measured on a large elastic wing in the NASA Langley Transonic Dynamics Tunnel. The wing had a supercritical airfoil shape and a leading-edge sweepback of 28.8 deg. The wing was heavily instrumented to measure both static and dynamic pressures and deflections. A hydraulically driven outboard control surface was oscillated to generate unsteady airloads on the wing. Representative results from the wind tunnel tests are presented and discussed, and the unexpected occurrence of an unusual dynamic wing instability, which was sensitive to angle of attack, is reported