25,087 research outputs found
Assessing the Effectiveness of Health Care Cost Containment Measures
Using SOEP panel data and difference-in-differences methods, this study is the first to empirically evaluate the effectiveness of four different health care cost containment measures within an integrated framework. The four measures investigated were introduced in Germany in 1997 to reduce moral hazard and public health expenditures in the market for convalescent care. Doubling the daily copayments was clearly the most effective cost containment measure, resulting in a reduction in demand of about 20 percent. Indirect measures such as allowing employers to cut statutory sick pay or paid vacation during health spa stays did not significantly reduce demand.copayment, cost containment measures, health expenditures, convalescent care, SOEP
Approximate Waveforms for Extreme-Mass-Ratio Inspirals in Modified Gravity Spacetimes
Extreme-mass-ratio inspirals, in which a stellar-mass compact object spirals
into a supermassive black hole, are prime candidates for detection with
space-borne milliHertz gravitational wave detectors, similar to the Laser
Interferometer Space Antenna. The gravitational waves generated during such
inspirals encode information about the background in which the small object is
moving, providing a tracer of the spacetime geometry and a probe of
strong-field physics. In this paper, we construct approximate,
"analytic-kludge" waveforms for such inspirals with parameterized
post-Einsteinian corrections that allow for generic, model-independent
deformations of the supermassive black hole background away from the Kerr
metric. These approximate waveforms include all of the qualitative features of
true waveforms for generic inspirals, including orbital eccentricity and
relativistic precession. The deformations of the Kerr metric are modeled using
a recently proposed, modified gravity bumpy metric, which parametrically
deforms the Kerr spacetime while ensuring that three approximate constants of
the motion remain for geodesic orbits: a conserved energy, azimuthal angular
momentum and Carter constant. The deformations represent modified gravity
effects and have been analytically mapped to several modified gravity black
hole solutions in four dimensions. In the analytic kludge waveforms, the
conservative motion is modeled by a post-Newtonian expansion of the geodesic
equations in the deformed spacetimes, which in turn induce modifications to the
radiation-reaction force. These analytic-kludge waveforms serve as a first step
toward complete and model-independent tests of General Relativity with extreme
mass-ratio inspirals.Comment: v1: 28 pages, no figures; v2: minor changes for consistency with
accepted version, 2 figures added showing sample waveforms; accepted by Phys.
Rev.
Assessing the Effectiveness of Health Care Cost Containment Measures
Using SOEP panel data and difference-in-differences methods, this study is the first to empirically evaluate the effectiveness of four different health care cost containment measures within an integrated framework. The four measures investigated were introduced in Germany in 1997 to reduce moral hazard and public health expenditures in the market for convalescent care. Doubling the daily copayments was clearly the most effective cost containment measure, resulting in a reduction in demand of about 20 percent. Indirect measures such as allowing employers to cut statutory sick pay or paid vacation during health spa stays did not significantly reduce demand.health expenditures, cost containment measures, copayment, convalescent care, SOEP
Revisiting the Income-Health Nexus: The Importance of Choosing the "Right" Indicator
We show that the choice of the welfare measure has a substantial impact on the degree of welfare-related health inequality. Combining various income and wealth measures with different health measures, we calculate 80 health concentration indices. The influence of the welfare measure is more pronounced when using subjective health measures than when using objective health measures.income measurement, concentration index, health inequality, SOEP
Revisiting the Income-Health Nexus: The Importance of Choosing the "Right" Indicator
We show that the choice of the welfare measure has a substantial impact on the degree of welfare-related health inequality. Combining various income and wealth measures with different health measures, we calculate 80 health concentration indices. The influence of the welfare measure is more pronounced when using subjective health measures than when using objective health measures.health inequality, concentration index, income measurement, SOEP
Determining Energy Balance in the Flaring Chromosphere from Oxygen V Line Ratios
The impulsive phase of solar flares is a time of rapid energy deposition and
heating in the lower solar atmosphere, leading to changes in the temperature
and density structure of the region. We use an O V density diagnostic formed of
the 192 to 248 line ratio, provided by Hinode EIS, to determine the density of
flare footpoint plasma, at O V formation temperatures of 250,000 K, giving a
constraint on the properties of the heated transition region. Hinode EIS
rasters from 2 small flare events in December 2007 were used. Raster images
were co-aligned to identify and establish the footpoint pixels,
multiple-component Gaussian line fitting of the spectra was carried out to
isolate the diagnostic pair, and the density was calculated for several
footpoint areas. The assumptions of equilibrium ionization and optically thin
radiation for the O V lines were found to be acceptable. Properties of the
electron distribution, for one event, were deduced from earlier RHESSI hard
X-ray observations and used to calculate the plasma heating rate, delivered by
an electron beam adopting collisional thick-target assumptions, for 2 model
atmospheres. Electron number densities of at least log n = 12.3 cm-3 were
measured during the flare impulsive phase, far higher than previously expected.
For one footpoint, the radiative loss rate for this plasma was found to exceed
that which can be delivered by an electron beam implied by the RHESSI data.
However, when assuming a completely ionised target atmosphere the heating rate
exceeded the losses. A chromospheric thickness of 70-700 km was found to be
required to balance a conductive input to the O V-emitting region with
radiative losses. The analysis shows that for heating by collisional electrons,
it is difficult, or impossible to raise the temperature of the chromosphere to
explain the observed densities without assuming a completely ionised
atmosphere.Comment: Accepted to A&A 14th September 201
Zooming into the Cosmic Horseshoe: new insights on the lens profile and the source shape
The gravitational lens SDSS J1148+1930, also known as the Cosmic Horseshoe,
is one of the biggest and of the most detailed Einstein rings ever observed. We
use the forward reconstruction method implemented in the lens fitting code
Lensed to investigate with great detail the properties of the lens and of the
background source. We model the lens with different mass distributions,
focusing in particular on the determination of the slope of the dark matter
component. The inherent degeneracy between the lens slope and the source size
can be broken when we can isolate separate components of each lensed image, as
in this case. For an elliptical power law model, , the
results favour a flatter-than-isothermal slope with a maximum-likelihood value
t = 0.08. Instead, when we consider the contribution of the baryonic matter
separately, the maximum-likelihood value of the slope of the dark matter
component is t = 0.31 or t = 0.44, depending on the assumed Initial Mass
Function. We discuss the origin of this result by analysing in detail how the
images and the sources change when the slope t changes. We also demonstrate
that these slope values at the Einstein radius are not inconsistent with recent
forecast from the theory of structure formation in the LambdaCDM model.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA
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