Health Insurance Competition: The Effect of Group Contracts

In countries like the US and the Netherlands health insurance is provided by private firms. These private firms can offer both individual and group contracts. The strategic and welfare implications of such group contracts are not well understood. Using a Dutch data set of about 700 group health insurance contracts over the period 2007-2008, we estimate a model to determine which factors explain the price of group contracts. We find that groups that are located close to an insurers’ home turf pay a higher premium than other groups. This finding is not consistent with the bargaining argument in the literature as it implies that concentrated groups close to an insurer’s home turf should get (if any) a larger discount than other groups. A simple Hotelling model, however, does explain our empirical results.health insurance;health-plan choice;managed competition

Remember the Dream... It\u27s Our Time to Act!

Fairfield University\u27s 2012 Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday Observance... MLK Convocation Featuring Coach Herman Boone. Coach Herman Boone is the former coach of the T.C. Williams High School football team. Boone was portrayed by Denzel Washington in the highly popular Disney movie Remember the Titans. Come hear his inspiring talk on Thursday, January 26 at 3 p.m. at the Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts!https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/bennettcenter-posters/1293/thumbnail.jp

This Is the Way: Faculty on the Camino de Santiago

Excerpt from book chapter: For nearly a millennium, pilgrims have made their way to Santiago de Compostela to visit the tomb of Saint James. These pilgrims initially journeyed from the Iberian Peninsula and then greater Europe, establishing over a dozen routes to reach the northwestern city in modern-day Galicia, a province of Spain. These routes followed established pathways connecting urban hubs, ports, and trade channels. While the number of pilgrims rose steadily in the Middle Ages through the Renaissance, the popularity of pilgrimage mirrored that of the Catholic Church and began to wane with the onset of the Enlightenment. It is not until the late twentieth century that we begin to see the Camino\u27s revitalization and then a boom in participation in the first decades of this century...https://scholarworks.wm.edu/educationbookchapters/1055/thumbnail.jp

Detailed Analysis of Scatter Contribution from Different Simulated Geometries of X-ray Detectors.

Scattering is one of the main issues left in planar mammography examinations, as it degrades the quality of the image and complicates the diagnostic process. Although widely used, anti-scatter grids have been found to be inefficient, increasing the dose delivered, the equipment price and not eliminating all the scattered radiation. Alternative scattering reduction methods, based on postprocessing algorithms using Monte Carlo (MC) simulations, are being developed to substitute anti-scatter grids. Idealized detectors are commonly used in the simulations for the purpose of simplification. In this study, the scatter distribution of three detector geometries is analyzed and compared: Case 1 makes use of idealized detector geometry, Case 2 uses a scintillator plate and Case 3 uses a more realistic detector simulation, based on the structure of an indirect mammography X-ray detector. This paper demonstrates that common configuration simplifications may introduce up to 14% of underestimation of the scatter in simulation results

Thermal near infrared monitoring system for electron beam melting with emissivity tracking

This paper presents the design of a high speed, high resolution silicon based thermal imaging instrument and its application to thermally image the temperature distributions of an electron beam melting additive manufacturing system. Typically, thermal images are produced at mid or long wavelengths of infrared radiation. Using the shorter wavelengths that silicon focal plane arrays are sensitive to allows the use of standard windows in the optical path. It also affords fewer modifications to the machine and enables us to make use of mature silicon camera technology. With this new instrument, in situ thermal imaging of the entire build area has been made possible at high speed, allowing defect detection and melt pool tracking. Melt pool tracking was used to implement an emissivity correction algorithm, which produced more accurate temperatures of the melted areas of the layer

Balloon-borne radiometer measurement of Northern Hemisphere mid-latitude stratospheric HNO3 profiles spanning 12 years

Low-resolution atmospheric thermal emission spectra collected by balloon-borne radiometers over the time span of 1990–2002 are used to retrieve vertical profiles of HNO3, CFC-11 and CFC-12 volume mixing ratios between approximately 10 and 35 km altitude. All of the data analyzed have been collected from launches from a Northern Hemisphere mid-latitude site, during late summer, when stratospheric dynamic variability is at a minimum. The retrieval technique incorporates detailed forward modeling of the instrument and the radiative properties of the atmosphere, and obtains a best fit between modeled and measured spectra through a combination of onion-peeling and global optimization steps. The retrieved HNO3 profiles are consistent over the 12-year period, and are consistent with recent measurements by the Atmospheric Chemistry Experiment-Fourier transform spectrometer satellite instrument. This suggests that, to within the errors of the 1990 measurements, there has been no significant change in the HNO3 summer mid-latitude profile