Description: Employer and payers need to actively seek change in the system of mental health care deliveryoperational, clinical, and financial change. From Financing Chronic Care Monograph, M-HB05-1.

Description: Essay reforming uninsured health care.

Description: Essay discussing cost, quality and access of healthcare and then describes the need for rationing.

Description: This paper reviews the geriatric literature to identify risk factors that could be used by insurers to identify existing or incipient frailty.

Description: Chapter 7 reviews several items that the study identified as requirements for a good risk assessment method. They are: accurate predictability, practicality and reasonable cost, limitation on ability to game the system, timeliness in regard to premiums, appropriate incentives for efficiency. From A Comparative Analysis of Methods of Health Risk Assessment, M-HB96-1.

Description: This paper discusses the the continuing cost of health insurance coverage represents a major problem for most of us. However, the long-term continuation of the excess growth rate of the health care economy verses the rest of the economy has the potential makings of a major crisis.

Description: Successful healthcare reform: First, it must help that must keep healthy people healthy. Second, it must help people mitigate or eliminate the health-risks associated with unhealthy lifestyle behavior choices, and Third, it must ensure the provision of evidence-based care to those who are ill.

Description: This paper provides an outline of three potential initiatives that may be undertaken by the government and the private sector. The first initiative aims at reducing the cost of health care at the provider level. The second initiative provides a means to improve the quality of health care. The third initiative creates a constructive basis for identifying medical best practices to enhance quality.

Description: Presented at the Living to 100 Symposium, January 2011. This paper examines the relationship between the earliest stages of dementia—mild cognitive impairment—and mortality. Using data from long-term care insurance applicants, and linking this to the Social Security Master Death File, the authors focus on the classification results of two cognitive screens used at various times in the underwriting process. Applying the Cox Proportional Hazards Model as well as relative mortality ratio analysis, the authors show that the proportion of individuals classified as cognitively impaired have significantly higher relative mortality compared to those classified as cognitively intact.

Description: Separating incident and prevalent populations is useful, but the use of a cohort to make an RTM adjustment is unwarranted in the population-based pre- versus post-period design. From Financing Chronic Care Monograph, M-HB05-1.