Federal Employees Health Benefits (FEHB) Program: An Overview

[Excerpt] The Federal Employees Health Benefits (FEHB) Program provides health insurance to federal employees, retirees, and their dependents. This report provides a general overview of FEHB. It describes the structure of FEHB, including eligibility for the program and coverage options available to enrollees, as well as premiums, benefits and cost sharing, and general financing of FEHB. The report also describes the role of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) in administering the program

Evaluation of the NAS-ILAB Matrix for Monitoring International Labor Standards: Project Report

The Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB) engaged the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to recommend a method to monitor and evaluate labor conditions in a given country. The method focuses on 5 labor standards: freedom of association and collective bargaining, forced or compulsory labor, child labor, discrimination, and acceptable conditions of work

Laws Affecting the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP)

[Excerpt] The purpose of the report is to provide historical and background information that helps explain how FEHBP has evolved into the program it is today. This report focuses solely on changes made to FEHBP through legislative action. Policymakers may use this report to understand how Congress has interacted with FEHBP in the past, and to inform its future interactions with FEHBP. Specifically, the report includes short discussions of how Congress has effected and maintained policy changes to FEHBP by restricting the use of federal funds; changed the formula for determining the government’s share of FEHBP premiums; expanded eligibility for the program; and implemented policies that affect the relationship between Medicare and FEHBP. The Appendix includes detailed summaries of selected laws or provisions of laws that have directly amended or otherwise changed FEHBP

Breastfeeding and Occupational Stress and Fatigue of Female Workers in Garment Manufacturing Companies

Female workers have not been clearly defined in the legislation that supports breastfeeding. Moreover, a significant number of them experience occupational stress and fatique, which may disturb productivity. The research aimed to reveal the stress and fatigue level of breastfeeding female workers from garment companies in Sobosukawonosraten area of Central Java. Using cross sectional approach, this analytical survey involved 210 female workers of six garment companies across six districts. Furthermore, cluster snowball sampling technique was used to sample the workers, and chi-square test was used to analyze the data. Research results indicated a significant correlation between breastfeeding and occupational stress (X2= 15.307, p= 0.000) with an effect of 26.1% (C= 26.1; OR= 3.124); and another significant correlation between breastfeeding and occupational fatigue (X2= 15.307, p= 0.000) with a 55.5% effect (C= 55.5; OR= 30.82). On the whole, breastfeeding female workers have special needs and require attention from the companies in order to continue supporting good breastfeeding for the babies, who will become the nation’s future generation

The Subjective Costs of Health Losses Due to Chronic Diseases: An Alternative Model for Monetary Appraisal

This paper proposes a method to evaluate health losses or gains by looking at the impact on well-being of a change in health status. The paper presents estimates of the equivalent income change that would be necessary to change general satisfaction with life to the same extent as a change in health satisfaction would do. In other words, we estimate the income equivalent of health changes. Next, the health satisfaction changes are linked to specific diseases in order to estimate the income equivalent for various diseases. This method uses answers to well-being and health satisfaction questions as posed in a large German data set. We distinguish between workers and non-workers and between inhabitants of East- and West- Germany. We find, for instance, that for West-workers hearing impediments are on average equivalent to an income reduction of about 20%, and that heart blood difficulties are for the same group equivalent to a 47% income reduction.chronic diseases, equivalent income, health damages, health satisfaction, well-being.

Income Satisfaction Inequality and Its Causes

In this paper, the concept of Income Satisfaction Inequality is operationalized on the basis of individual responses to an Income Satisfaction question posed in the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP). Income satisfaction is the subjective analogue of the objective income concept and includes objective income inequality as a special case. The paper introduces a method to decompose Income Satisfaction Inequality according to the contributions from variables such as income, education, and the number of children. Given the panel structure of the data, inequality may be attributed partly to permanent individual circumstances and partly to transitory changes. The paper shows that by far the largest part of the satisfaction inequality has to be ascribed to unobserved heterogeneity. Distinguishing between a structural and an unexplained part of inequality we find that income explains the largest part of structural Income Satisfaction Inequality together with household membership; for non-working individuals, the age distribution is very relevant as well.Equivalent Income, Financial Satisfaction, Income Satisfaction, Income Inequality, Variance Decomposition.

The Anatomy of Subjective Well-Being

Subjective Well-Being has increasingly been studied by several economists. This paper fits in that literature but takes into account that there are different aspects of life such as health, financial situation, and job. We call them domains. In this paper, we consider Subjective Well-Being as a composite of various domain satisfactions (DS). We postulate a two -layer model where individual Subjective Well-Being is explained by individual subjective domain satisfactions with respect to job, finance, health, leisure, housing, and environment. We distinguish between long -term and short - term effects. Next, we explain domain satisfactions and Subjective Well-Being by objectively measurable variables such as income. We estimate a model for the GS and DS equations with individual random effects and fix time effects.Subjective Well-Being, satisfaction measurement, qualitative regressors, health satisfaction, job satisfaction

Planar immersion lens with metasurfaces

The solid immersion lens is a powerful optical tool that allows light entering material from air or vacuum to focus to a spot much smaller than the free-space wavelength. Conventionally, however, they rely on semispherical topographies and are non-planar and bulky, which limits their integration in many applications. Recently, there has been considerable interest in using planar structures, referred to as metasurfaces, to construct flat optical components for manipulating light in unusual ways. Here, we propose and demonstrate the concept of a planar immersion lens based on metasurfaces. The resulting planar device, when placed near an interface between air and dielectric material, can focus electromagnetic radiation incident from air to a spot in material smaller than the free-space wavelength. As an experimental demonstration, we fabricate an ultrathin and flexible microwave lens and further show that it achieves wireless energy transfer in material mimicking biological tissue

Happiness and Financial Satisfaction in Israel: Effects of Religiosity, Ethnicity, and War

We analyze individual satisfaction with life as a whole and satisfaction with the personal financial situation for Israeli citizens of Jewish and Arab descent. Our data set is the Israeli Social Survey (2006). We are especially interested in the impact of the religions Judaism, Islam and Christianity, where we are able to differentiate between individuals who vary in religiosity between secular and ultra-orthodox. We find a significant effect of religiosity on happiness. With respect to Jewish families it is most striking that the impact of family size on both life and financial satisfaction seems to vary with religiosity. This might be a reason for differentiation in family equivalence scales. For Arab families we did not find this effect. First-generation immigrants are less happy than second-generation immigrants, while there is no significant difference between second-generation families and native families. The effect of the Lebanon War is much less than expected.religion, Israel, financial satisfaction, subjective well-being, happiness, immigration, terrorism