Mandatory and affordable health insurance

This paper asserts that America's health care system is broken and cannot be repaired with timid half-measures. It suggests that we need both universal coverage and a more efficient delivery system and that these are not competing objectives: Each is necessary to make the other possible. It further states that if we do not make health care more affordable and our delivery system more efficient and sustainable, a majority of Americans will be uninsured in short order. And the persistence of millions of uninsured impairs the efficiency we need to make health care and insurance affordable for all. Thus, contrary to conventional wisdom, this paper asserts that both universal coverage and delivery system reform must be pursued simultaneously.Insurance, Health ; Medical care

Baylor Health Care System: High-Performance Integrated Health Care

Describes the organization's implementation of a quality infrastructure and its strategies, interventions to improve clinical preventive services, training, and adoption of electronic health records and other quality innovations. Outlines lessons learned

Hill Physicians Medical Group: Independent Physicians Working to Improve Quality and Reduce Costs

Describes how a group of independent physicians improved clinical outcomes through an innovative incentive system -- combining pay-for-performance and fee-for-service -- implemented with quality improvement processes. Discusses lessons learned

Accommodating Complex Substitution Patterns in a Random Utility Model of Recreational Fishing

We employed a cross-nested logit (CNL) model that permits a rich pattern of substitution among alternatives within a closed form choice model. The specification we employed is ideal for applications with many choice alternatives, such as the 431 fishing sites in this application. The CNL model provided a significant improvement over multinomial and nested logit model specifications at explaining observed recreational fishing site choices by residents of northern Ontario, Canada. Results from two scenarios illustrated the implications of using the CNL model on spatial substitution patterns and welfare measures associated with attribute change scenarios. The CNL model forecasts demonstrated that the relative change in fishing site use was lower at the most affected sites and higher at sites near the affected sites than was predicted by the multinomial logit model. No consistent pattern was found in mean or variance of welfare estimates associated with hypothetical attribute changes.Compensating variation, cross-nested logit, fishing site choice, random utility model, spatial substitution, Demand and Price Analysis, Institutional and Behavioral Economics, Q26,