Medicaid's Future: What Might ACA Repeal Mean?

Issue: Republicans in Congress are expected to repeal portions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) using a fast-track process known as budget reconciliation.Goals: This issue brief examines how repeal legislation could affect Medicaid, the nation's health care safety net, which insured 70 million people in 2016.Findings and Conclusions: Partial-repeal legislation that passed Congress but was vetoed by President Obama in 2016 offers some insight but new legislation could go further. It could repeal the ACA's Medicaid eligibility expansions for adults and children but also roll back other provisions, such as simplified enrollment and improvements in long-term services and supports for beneficiaries with disabilities. Additionally, the Trump Administration could expand use of demonstration authority to introduce deeper structural changes into Medicaid, such as eligibility restrictions tied to work, required premium contributions and lock-out for nonpayment, annual enrollment periods, and coverage limits and exclusions. Together, these changes would have far-reaching implications for Medicaid's continued role as the nation's safety-net insurer

Challenges for the Evaluation of the P.I.P.P.I. - Programme of Intervention for Prevention of Institutionalisation: between Partecipative and Experimental Pathways

Evaluation is constantly requested by governments and decision-makers, to prove that social policies and actions undertaken are effective in responding to problems. Also programmes contrasting child neglect are involved in such request to guarantee that children enjoy their childhood and ensure access to quality service. This paper focuses on an Italian evaluation experience of one such programme named the P.I.P.P.I. (Programme of Intervention for Prevention of Institutionalisation), the outcome of a collaboration between the University of Padua and the Italian Ministry of Welfare. The paper questions and challenges the experimental designs normally used for these evaluation purposes, highlighting how knowledge of effective treatments is far from the practices delivered. The study proposes an innovative evaluation path in which the participative evaluation, where the professionals build their own knowledge through an evaluation in the field, coexists with the choice of matching as a (quasi) experimental evaluation, responding to the Government\u2019s request for effective investments

Do phantom Cuntz-Krieger algebras exist?

If phantom Cuntz-Krieger algebras do not exist, then real rank zero Cuntz-Krieger algebras can be characterized by outer properties. In this survey paper, a summary of the known results on non-existence of phantom Cuntz-Krieger algebras is given.Comment: 8 page

Review of From Classroom to Battlefield: Victoria High School and the First World War by Barry Gough

Review of From Classroom to Battlefield: Victoria High School and the First World War by Barry Gough

Responding to gratitude in elicited oral interaction. A taxonomy of communicative options

This study explores responses to gratitude as expressed in elicited oral interaction (mimetic-pretending open role-plays) produced by native speakers of American English. It first overviews the literature on this topic. It then presents a taxonomy of the head acts and supporting moves of the responses to gratitude instantiated in the corpus under examination, which considers their strategies and formulations. Finally, it reports on their frequency of occurrence and combinatorial options across communicative situations differing in terms of the social distance and power relationships between the interactants. The findings partly confirm what reported in the literature, but partly reveal the flexibility and adaptability of these reacting speech acts to the variable context in which they may be instantiated. On the one hand, the responses to gratitude identified tend to be encoded as simple utterances, and occasionally as complex combinations of head acts and/or supporting moves; also, their head acts show a preference for a small set of strategies and formulation types, while their supporting moves are much more varied in content and form, and thus situation-specific. On the other hand, the frequency of occurrence of the responses to gratitude, their dispersion across situations, and the range of their attested strategies and formulations are not in line with those reported in previous studies. I argue that these partly divergent findings are to be related to the different data collection and categorization procedures adopted, and the different communicative situations considered across studies. Overall, the study suggests that: responses to gratitude are a set of communicative events with fuzzy boundaries, which contains core (i.e. more prototypical) and peripheral (i.e. less prototypical) exemplars; although routinized in function, responses to gratitude are not completely conventionalized in their strategic or surface realizations; alternative research approaches may provide complementary insights into these reacting speech acts; and a higher degree of comparability across studies may be ensured if explicit pragmatic and semantic parameters are adopted in the classification of their shared object of study

Teaching geography with literary mapping: A didactic experiment

The relationship between maps and literature has long been debated from both narrative and geographical perspectives. At the core of this contribution are so-called reader generated mappings, mapping practices performed after the reading of a literary text. The aim of this article is to suggest possible didactic directions for teaching geography through geo-visualisations based on the reading of literary texts. In particular, this research draws from the results of a literary mapping workshop attended by students during an introductory human geography course at the University of Padua (Italy). Focusing on one of the literary mappings performed by the students, namely the mapping of a short story written by the Italian writer Mario Rigoni Stern, a deductive process is used to understand the possible future potentialities of literary mapping in didactics. Analysing the students\u2019 literary maps, this article aims to direct attention to literary mapping practices as constellations of learning moments to exploit. The reading of the text, the envisioning and creation of the map are here explored as the steps of a complex practice capable of visually developing geographical knowledge

An improved method for solving quasilinear convection diffusion problems on a coarse mesh

A method is developed for solving quasilinear convection diffusion problems starting on a coarse mesh where the data and solution-dependent coefficients are unresolved, the problem is unstable and approximation properties do not hold. The Newton-like iterations of the solver are based on the framework of regularized pseudo-transient continuation where the proposed time integrator is a variation on the Newmark strategy, designed to introduce controllable numerical dissipation and to reduce the fluctuation between the iterates in the coarse mesh regime where the data is rough and the linearized problems are badly conditioned and possibly indefinite. An algorithm and updated marking strategy is presented to produce a stable sequence of iterates as boundary and internal layers in the data are captured by adaptive mesh partitioning. The method is suitable for use in an adaptive framework making use of local error indicators to determine mesh refinement and targeted regularization. Derivation and q-linear local convergence of the method is established, and numerical examples demonstrate the theory including the predicted rate of convergence of the iterations.Comment: 21 pages, 8 figures, 1 tabl