Improving Health Care Access for Older Alaskans: What Are the Options?

This report focuses on the problem older Alaskans who rely on Medicare face getting access to primary care, and discusses some of the options policymakers are considering to resolve the problem. But older Americans across the country also report difficulty getting the primary care they need. The discussion here sheds light on the problem and potential solutions nationwide. Most Americans 65 and older use Medicare as their primary health insurance. Medicare is federal health insurance for people 65 and older, people under 65 with certain disabilities, and people of any age with end-stage renal disease—but this report looks only at access issues for Medicare beneficiaries 65 and older. Doctors don’t have to participate in the Medicare program. But those who do participate have to accept, as full payment, what Medicare pays for specific services. Many primary-care doctors say Medicare doesn’t pay them enough to cover their costs—so growing numbers are declining to see new Medicare patients. Among primary-care doctors nationwide, 61% accept new Medicare patients.1 National surveys sponsored by the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission have found that 17% of Medicare patients in the U.S. had “a big problem” finding family doctors in 2007—up from 13% in 2005.2 In Alaska, a 2008 survey by the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER) found that just over half of Alaska’s primary-care doctors were willing to treat new Medicare patients.3 The situation was worse in Anchorage, where 40% of all older Alaskans live. Only 17% of primary-care doctors in Anchorage were willing to treat new Medicare patients as of 2008 (Figure 1).4The Harold E. Pomeroy Public Policy Research EndowmentIntroduction / How Medicare Works / Closed Doors / Older Anchorage Residents and Primary Care / Options for Changing Access to Primary Care: What is Alaska Considering? / Conclusions / Appendi

UA Research Summary No. 14

In the past few years, Alaskans have been hearing reports that some primary-care doctors won’t see new Medicare patients. Medicare pays these doctors only about two-thirds of what private insurance pays—and that’s after a sizable increase in 2009. But most Americans 65 or older have to use Medicare as their main insurance, even if they also have private insurance. Just how widespread is the problem of Alaska’s primary-care doctors turning away Medicare patients? ISER surveyed hundreds of doctors to find out—and learned that so far there’s a major problem in Anchorage, a noticeable problem in the Mat-Su Borough and Fairbanks, and almost no problem in other areas.University of Alaska Foundation

Bidirectional syntactic priming across cognitive domains: from arithmetic to language and back

Scheepers et al. (2011) showed that the structure of a correctly solved mathematical equation affects how people subsequently complete sentences containing high vs. low relative-clause attachment ambiguities. Here we investigated whether such effects generalise to different structures and tasks, and importantly, whether they also hold in the reverse direction (i.e., from linguistic to mathematical processing). In a questionnaire-based experiment, participants had to solve structurally left- or right-branching equations (e.g., 5 × 2 + 7 versus 5 + 2 × 7) and to provide sensicality ratings for structurally left- or right-branching adjective-noun-noun compounds (e.g., alien monster movie versus lengthy monster movie). In the first version of the experiment, the equations were used as primes and the linguistic expressions as targets (investigating structural priming from maths to language). In the second version, the order was reversed (language-to-maths priming). Both versions of the experiment showed clear structural priming effects, conceptually replicating and extending the findings from Scheepers et al. (2011). Most crucially, the observed bi-directionality of cross-domain structural priming strongly supports the notion of shared syntactic representations (or recursive procedures to generate and parse them) between arithmetic and language

A review of melt and vapor growth techniques for polydiacetylene thin films for nonlinear optical applications

Methods for the growth of polydiacetylene thin films by melt and vapor growth and their subsequent polymerization are summarized. Films with random orientations were obtained when glass or quartz were used as substrates in the vapor growth process. Oriented polydiacetylene films were fabricated by the vapor deposition of diacetylene monomer onto oriented polydiacetylene on a glass substrate and its subsequent polymerization by UV light. A method for the growth of oriented thin films by a melt-shear growth process as well as a method of film growth by seeded recrstallization from the melt between glass plates, that may be applied to the growth of polydiacetylene films, are described. Moreover, a method is presented for the fabrication of single crystal thin films of polyacetylenes by irradiation of the surface of diacetylene single crystals to a depth between 100 and 2000 angstroms

Delivering high-level food industry skills for future food security through Advanced Training Partnerships

The UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council’s Advanced Training Partnerships initiative represents a significant investment in the provision of high-level skills for the UK food industry sector to address global food security from farm to fork. This paper summarises the background, aims and scope of the Advanced Training Partnerships, their development so far, and offers a view on future directions and evaluation of impact

An Analysis of the Factors Affecting Attitudes toward Drone Delivery and the Moderating Effect of COVID-19

This research explored the factors affecting attitudes toward drone delivery and the moderating effect of COVID-19. Government effort to address the COVID-19 pandemic has led to social distancing and shelter-in-place guidelines. Many states have imposed additional regulations, restricting retailers from offering in-store shopping and restaurants from offering indoor dining. As a result, the use of delivery services has increased. In a further effort to reduce virus spread, some delivery services now offer a contact-free option. The contact-free option permits orders to be left at a designated location, eliminating the physical-human interaction upon delivery. The contact-free nature and potential speed of drone delivery make using the technology a viable option amidst today’s social distancing guidelines. The findings of this study support drone delivery as a feasible delivery option. The perceived attributes, COVID-19 variable, performance risk, and drone familiarity were found to be predictors of attitude toward drone delivery. All the predictors have a positive relationship with attitude except perceived risk. Attitude, the perceived attributes, the presence of COVID-19, and gender are the best predictors of intention to use drone delivery. Perceived risks are not significant predictors of intention to use drone delivery. Compared to a pre-COVID-19 study conducted in 2018, the perceived attributes account for 26% more and the perceived risks account for 81% less of the variance in predicting attitude. Similarly, compared to the pre-COVID-19 study, the perceived attributes account for 58% more and the perceived risks account for 74% less of the variance in predicting intention. This indicates that the perceived attributes of drone delivery weigh more and the perceived risks weigh less on attitude and intention than the earlier study. To draw these conclusions, a model based on the Technology Acceptance Model and Diffusion of Innovations theory was adopted and modified from a previous study. Then, a survey was administered on August 26th, 2020, to Americans aged 18 and older via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform. A round of interviews was also administered. Following collection of the data, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were conducted. Model fit was confirmed through confirmatory factor analysis. Three hierarchical multiple regressions were carried out. The first identified the significant predictors of attitude as stated above. The second regression revealed that COVID-19 had a direct effect in lieu of a moderator effect on attitudes toward drone delivery. The third and final regression identified the significant predictors of intention as previously stated. Contributions of this study include identifying a direct effect of COVID-19 on attitudes towards drone delivery, discovering the best predictors of attitudes and intention to use drone delivery and a model with replicable results that may be used to measure attitude and intention in the future

Genealogy research, Internet research and genealogy tourism

Includes bibliographic references