Payment Reform: Creating a Sustainable Future for Medicaid

Outlines elements of Medicaid payment reform that saves costs while improving access to quality care, including accommodating patient acuity, encouraging data collection, and supporting medical homes, bundled payments, and accountable care organizations

[Symposium Remarks by UNH Professor of History David Bachrach, April 12, 2016 ]

Magna Carta did not emerge de novo in its fully fledged state in the late spring of 1215. The list of baronial demands, made on behalf of the kingdom as a whole, were born out of grievances that, in some cases, dated back more than a century. University of New Hampshire Professor of History David Bachrach discusses several key clauses of the Magna Carta as well as why this document was a touchstone for major political change

Federally-Facilitated Exchanges and the Continuum of State Options

Examines the features in eligibility, enrollment, plan management, consumer assistance, and financial management of three health insurance exchange models: state-based, federally facilitated, and partnership exchanges. Considers implications for states

Health Coverage for Immigrants in New York: An Update on Policy Developments and Next Steps

Examines the implementation of a New York State Court of Appeals decision to extend coverage to legal immigrants, and addresses the need for federal financial assistance to help provide health coverage to legal immigrants on the same basis as citizens

Incentives and Efficiency in Uncertain Collaborative Environments

We consider collaborative systems where users make contributions across multiple available projects and are rewarded for their contributions in individual projects according to a local sharing of the value produced. This serves as a model of online social computing systems such as online Q&A forums and of credit sharing in scientific co-authorship settings. We show that the maximum feasible produced value can be well approximated by simple local sharing rules where users are approximately rewarded in proportion to their marginal contributions and that this holds even under incomplete information about the player's abilities and effort constraints. For natural instances we show almost 95% optimality at equilibrium. When players incur a cost for their effort, we identify a threshold phenomenon: the efficiency is a constant fraction of the optimal when the cost is strictly convex and decreases with the number of players if the cost is linear

Neuronal bases of structural coherence in contemporary dance observation

The neuronal processes underlying dance observation have been the focus of an increasing number of brain imaging studies over the past decade. However, the existing literature mainly dealt with effects of motor and visual expertise, whereas the neural and cognitive mechanisms that underlie the interpretation of dance choreographies remained unexplored. Hence, much attention has been given to the Action Observation Network (AON) whereas the role of other potentially relevant neuro-cognitive mechanisms such as mentalizing (theory of mind) or language (narrative comprehension) in dance understanding is yet to be elucidated. We report the results of an fMRI study where the structural coherence of short contemporary dance choreographies was manipulated parametrically using the same taped movement material. Our participants were all trained dancers. The whole-brain analysis argues that the interpretation of structurally coherent dance phrases involves a subpart (Superior Parietal) of the AON as well as mentalizing regions in the dorsomedial Prefrontal Cortex. An ROI analysis based on a similar study using linguistic materials (Pallier et al. 2011) suggests that structural processing in language and dance might share certain neural mechanisms