The Development of the Irish Private Health Insurance Market and Evidence of Selection Effects Therein

This paper tracks the development of the Irish private health insurance market, both in terms of its legislative background and the development of competition. Literature on adverse selection and risk selection is then reviewed. Data from two surveys of consumers are then analysed to determine whether evidence exists of adverse selection or risk selection in the Irish private health insurance market. Both of these issues are relevant in the context of the debate over risk equalisation in the market in Ireland.Private health insurance, adverse selection, risk selection

ADDRESSING MARKET SEGMENTATION AND INCENTIVES FOR RISK SELECTION: HOW WELL DOES RISK EQUALISATION IN THE IRISH PRIVATE HEALTH INSURANCE MARKET WORK? ESRI Research Bulletin 2017/05

Community rating restricts health insurers from varying premiums based on insurees’ risk profiles. It is a key feature of many health insurance markets. While designed to promote equity, this regulation incentivises insurers to focus on attracting low-risk (profitable) consumers while avoiding high-risk (unprofitable) consumers. This phenomenon is known as “risk selection”. Risk selection has a number of negative consequences, such as market segmentation and poor quality service to high-risk individuals (e.g. the old and sick). It also causes inefficiency where investment focusses on attracting low-risk individuals (e.g. the young and healthy) rather than improving price and quality. The best strategy for reducing risk selection incentives is good risk equalisation. Commonly, this involves providing risk-adjusted premium subsidies to insurers based on insurees’ risk profiles. These subsidies are generally administered through a risk equalisation scheme. Our study investigated the performance of Ireland’s scheme. Despite the liberalisation of the Irish health insurance market in the mid-1990s, bona-fide risk equalisation payments only commenced in 2013. The current risk equalisation system allocates risk-adjusted subsidies to insurers based on the age, sex, level of cover, and hospital utilisation, of insurees

Palaeogeographic implications of braid bar deposition in the Triassic Molteno formation of the eastern Karoo Basin, South Africa

The Triassic Molteno Formation in the main Karoo Basin, South Africa, forms a northerly thinning intracratonic clastic wedge deposited by sandy braided rivers of South Saskatchewan type. Deposition of the sandy facies was dominated by channel floor mega-ripples producing trough cross-bedded cosets; transverse bars, represented by solitary, large-scale planar sets are not significant. Departures from this regional pattern of sandstone deposition occur along the northern distal margin of the Molteno basin around Bethlehem in the Orange Free State. Here thickness trends and clast size delineate a deep channel system interpreted as the main braided exit channel from the basin. Because of its depth and constriction by local height differentials the competency and capacity of the flow were able to reproduce features more typical of proximal rather than distal depositional settings. The sandy facies is dominated by fine gravel with lesser amounts of coarse sand. Gravel occurs as longitudinal bars some of which contain low angle foreset stratification whose orientation is consistent with lateral growth and marginal riffle migration. The scale of the bars and simple deposi- tional form imply that they may have been larger than modern equivalents and the flows deeper. The coarse sand occurs mainly as falling water stage features associated with the gravel bars. Shallow channel-fills, bar edge sand wedges, bar top sheet sands and thicker channel sands have been recognised and compared with similar features in modern and ancient braided stream sediments. When traced to the southeast the deep channel sediments contain few longitudinal gravel bars and more transverse bars; the vertical sequence from longitudinal to transverse bars at this locality points to the increasing distality of the depositional site through time.Bernard Price Institute for Palaeontological Researc

Sedimentological characteristics of the "red muds" at Makapansgat Limeworks

Main articleThe "red muds" which occur at Rodent Corner along the west face of the exit quarry at Makapansgat limeworks have been divided into two sedimentary facies according to lithology, sedimentary properties and biological content: (1) coarse sandstone; and (2) siltstone and fine-sandstone. These two facies form a depositional couplet or sedimentary motif that occurs throughout the deposits and can be used as a basis for interpretation of the conditions of deposition. The coarse sandstone facies consists of thin lenticular beds which contain occasional elongate bone fragments showing a pronounced sedimentary fabric. This facies was probably deposited by flowing water, but, because of its coarse grain size, scale and low granulometric contrast, traction current structures such as cross-bedding and ripple cross-lamination were not developed. The angular character of the individual grains implies a short distance of transport and local derivation of the facies. The siltstone and fine sandstone facies is red and calcareous and contains sporadically distributed coarse sand grains. It is generally thicker and laterally more persistent than the coarse sandstone facies and capped by a mudcracked surface. The general characteristics of this facies are consistent with deposition in slow-moving or standing water from quiet suspension sedimentation. Shallowing of the water, related to changes in level of the water table, led to exposure of the depositional surface and the development of mudcracks. A variation of this facies pattern occurs in the middle of the succession where two limestone layers were deposited, the upper one intimately associated with local concentrations of cave pearls which originated from the lime-rich surface waters in locally agitated pools by concentration and precipitation of carbonate about a central nucleus. The facies couplet is interpreted in terms of storm and fair weather processes and compared with modern analogues found on shallow marine shelves, alluvial plains and in lakes. The coarse sandstone facies is attributed to storms and heavy rainfall outside the cave washing in coarse sandy detritus and raising the level of the water table. Between storm episodes quiet suspension sedimentation occurred accompanied by a gradual shallowing of the water table. Thus the coarse sandstone facies provides clues to storm periodicities and rainfall and suggests a rather wet climatic regime at this time. The red muds at Rodent Corner differ from those near the "Ancient Entrance" in that they contain coarse sandy interbeds, implying that the two deposits were separated from one another, possibly by a floor high, and that the opening into the cave at this time was small and probably located close to Rodent Corner.Non

Customer satisfaction, training and TQM: a comparative study of Western and Thai hotels

Managers within the hospitality industry make frequent reference to TQM principles. The extent to which these principles are applied effectively within the human resource management area of hospitality however remains under-researched. By applying TQM principles, this paper focusses on the relationship between customer service and training drawing upon comparative data from Western and Thai hotels. The paper also examines the perceptions of staff towards of hotels' guest-orientation and the provision of quality guest services. The researchers found that guest assessments of the performance of hotel frontline staff depend on their services function (e.g., front-office, housekeeping). The service quality skills needed by frontline staff were also found to differ in the case of Western and Thai hotels. Such differences merit proper consideration on the part of managers within the major hotel chains. The various findings may assist hospitality managers to determine appropriate strategies for the enhancement of guest services particularly in cross-cultural settings

An International Discourse Community, an Internationalist Perspective: Reading EATAW Conference Programs, 2001-2011

This article seeks to characterize the discourse community represented by the biennial conferences of the European Association for the Teaching of Academic Writing (EATAW). Drawing on information from EATAW's conference programs, the authors define the topical emphases of the 565 standard presentation abstracts (SPAs) accepted for the first six conferences, identify some of the community's dominant research practices and common methods of presentation, and track the changing international distribution of presenters over time. We conclude that the EATAW discourse community, true to its name, has remained focused primarily on pedagogy and on pragmatic research aimed at improving teaching practices. Working in a multilingual context, EATAW teachers/researchers tend towards an 'internationalist perspective' (Horner and Trimbur 2002: 624), one that is attentive to linguistic and cultural differences and favours empirical research as a means of identifying diverse student needs. This perspective, along with a tendency toward cross-institutional and international research partnerships, stands in contrast to the perspective of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) the conference which best represents the American composition tradition