Evaluating the effect of regulatory prohibitions against risk selection by health status on supplemental insurance ownership in Israel

In Israel, supplemental insurance, which covers services not included in the mandatory basic benefits package, is offered by sick funds and regulated by the Ministry of Health. In 1998, policy regulations were set to eliminate barriers that prevented the ill from purchasing supplemental insurance, thereby increasing equality and risk solidarity. In this paper, we examine whether these regulations have indeed changed the extent of ownership and characteristics of policyholders, using data from surveys conducted in 1995, 1997, 1999, and 2001. The findings indicate that while there were no significant changes between 1995 and 1997, there was a significant increase in ownership among those with poor health status after the new regulations came into effect. We conclude that administrative regulations can influence the structure of supplemental insurance to achieve desired social values, and discuss additional policy options that are currently under debate in Israel to further promote equality and solidarity in this market by increasing accessibility to low income and other underserved populations.Supplemental insurance Regulation Equality Solidarity Vulnerable populations Health System Reform Israel

New Hybrid Error Concealment for Digital Compressed Video

Transmission of a compressed video signal over a lossy communication network exposes the information to losses and errors, which leads to significant visible errors in the reconstructed frames at the decoder side. In this paper we present a new hybrid error concealment algorithm for compressed video sequences, based on temporal and spatial concealment methods. We describe spatial and temporal techniques for the recovery of lost blocks. In particular, we develop postprocessing techniques for the reconstruction of missing or damaged macroblocks. A new decision support tree is developed to efficiently choose the best appropriate error concealment method, according to the spatial and temporal characteristics of the sequence. The proposed algorithm is compared to three error concealment methods: spatial, temporal, and a previous hybrid approach using different noise levels. The results are evaluated using four quality measures. We show that our error concealment scheme outperforms all the other three methods for all the tested video sequences.</p

Factors affecting primary care physicians' perceptions of health system reform in Israel: Professional autonomy versus organizational affiliation

This paper examines primary care physicians' perceptions of a National Health Insurance Law that introduced managed competition into Israel's health care system, and the factors affecting their perceptions. Between April and July 1997, we conducted a mail survey of primary care physicians employed by Israel's four health plans (which are managed care organizations). Eight hundred questionnaires were returned, representing a response rate of 86%. The findings indicate that, overall most physicians support the components of the National Health Insurance Law with statistically significant differences among physicians by health plan. Multivariate analysis revealed that, contrary to theoretical expectations, a perceived decrease in professional autonomy and in the status of the profession following reform did not significantly affect attitudes toward national health insurance. These findings highlight the need for additional empirical studies to further examine theoretical contentions about the implications of infringing on the professional autonomy and the dominant status of physicians. The principal and most interesting finding of this study was the independent effect of health plan affiliation on physicians' attitudes toward each of the five components of the National Health Insurance Law, after controlling for background characteristics, for the reform's perceived effect on the physicians' autonomy and status in the health plan, and for the reform's perceived effect on the level of health plan services and the health plan's financial situation. We found that physicians' perceptions tended to conform to the formal position of their health plan, suggesting the need to analyze the attitudes of physicians in their organizational context, rather than treating them as members of a uniform professional community.Israel Health care reform Primary care physicians Attitudes Autonomy Organizational affiliation