The Experts below are selected from a list of 22224 Experts worldwide ranked by ideXlab platform
Elenora E Connors - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
-
health care reform in transition incremental insurance reform without an individual mandate
2010Co-Authors: Lawrence O Gostin, Elenora E ConnorsAbstract:A major access problem exists in the private insurance market for individuals with preexisting Conditions, who are either denied Coverage or charged exorbitant premiums. In effect, individuals are denied Coverage for exactly what they need, which jeopardizes their health and the financial security of their family. Before health reform passed, discussions surrounding incremental reform took place, including perhaps the most politically compelling – prohibiting insurers from denying Coverage to those with preexisting health Conditions. Insurance is based upon the principles of spreading risk of individuals across a population to ensure that everyone can afford medical care when he or she needs it. However, risk pools are functional only if they include enough healthy individuals to keep overall health care expenditures lower than premium costs so that high-cost individuals will be covered. Although providing access to health care for all is vital, in practice requiring insurers to accept more high cost individuals without adding more healthy individuals to the pool could result in adverse selection, increase costs, and a potential financial death spiral. If there are no incentives or mandates for individuals who are healthy to purchase insurance, risk pools become even more expensive and result in even more adverse selection and malfunctioning markets. A mandate to purchase insurance counteracts adverse selection by bringing more healthy individuals into the risk pool, thereby decreasing premiums. Moreover, mandates decrease the number of uninsured, lessening cost-shifting due to uncompensated care. A tax penalty would be levied on individuals who do not have qualifying insurance. Of course, adequate subsidies must also be provided for poor individuals and families to help purchase insurance. But while many support covering those with preexisting Conditions, support for a mandate is still contentious, even after the health reform law, which includes a mandate. Conservatives frame the mandate in terms of personal freedom, compulsory contracts, and transfer of money to a private party. In actuality, mandates combined with prohibition of excluding those with preexisting Conditions would prevent insurers from engaging in opportunistic marketing practices. The goals of health reform are to increase access to quality affordable care, while reining in costs. But preexisting Condition Coverage without an individual mandate may ultimately lead to insurance that is less affordable for everyone and make access problems even worse.
Lawrence O Gostin - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
-
health care reform in transition incremental insurance reform without an individual mandate
2010Co-Authors: Lawrence O Gostin, Elenora E ConnorsAbstract:A major access problem exists in the private insurance market for individuals with preexisting Conditions, who are either denied Coverage or charged exorbitant premiums. In effect, individuals are denied Coverage for exactly what they need, which jeopardizes their health and the financial security of their family. Before health reform passed, discussions surrounding incremental reform took place, including perhaps the most politically compelling – prohibiting insurers from denying Coverage to those with preexisting health Conditions. Insurance is based upon the principles of spreading risk of individuals across a population to ensure that everyone can afford medical care when he or she needs it. However, risk pools are functional only if they include enough healthy individuals to keep overall health care expenditures lower than premium costs so that high-cost individuals will be covered. Although providing access to health care for all is vital, in practice requiring insurers to accept more high cost individuals without adding more healthy individuals to the pool could result in adverse selection, increase costs, and a potential financial death spiral. If there are no incentives or mandates for individuals who are healthy to purchase insurance, risk pools become even more expensive and result in even more adverse selection and malfunctioning markets. A mandate to purchase insurance counteracts adverse selection by bringing more healthy individuals into the risk pool, thereby decreasing premiums. Moreover, mandates decrease the number of uninsured, lessening cost-shifting due to uncompensated care. A tax penalty would be levied on individuals who do not have qualifying insurance. Of course, adequate subsidies must also be provided for poor individuals and families to help purchase insurance. But while many support covering those with preexisting Conditions, support for a mandate is still contentious, even after the health reform law, which includes a mandate. Conservatives frame the mandate in terms of personal freedom, compulsory contracts, and transfer of money to a private party. In actuality, mandates combined with prohibition of excluding those with preexisting Conditions would prevent insurers from engaging in opportunistic marketing practices. The goals of health reform are to increase access to quality affordable care, while reining in costs. But preexisting Condition Coverage without an individual mandate may ultimately lead to insurance that is less affordable for everyone and make access problems even worse.
Doedy Sheehan Klar - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
-
the hipaa privacy rule an overview of compliance initiatives and requirements the privacy rule contains a maze of mandates and exceptions requiring that entities covered by hipaa need the best of health care counsel
2003Co-Authors: Nancy A Lawson, Jennifer M Orr, Doedy Sheehan KlarAbstract:The Privacy Project The Privacy Rule contains a maze of mandates and exceptions requiring that entities covered by HIPAA need the best of health care counsel THE Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) (Pub.L. No. 104-191) was created and enacted in response to the health care industry's request for standardization, as a remedy for increasingly frequent health care privacy breaches, and as an effort to halt steady increases in health care costs. It received bi-partisan Congressional and industry-wide approval and was signed into law on August 21, 1996. HIPAA's enactment was without much fanfare. Most attention focused on the fact that HIPAA (1) amended the Employees Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) to limit health plans' ability to use preexisting Condition Coverage exclusions and (2) barred discrimination by health plans in a variety of areas. A. Privacy Rule More important for defense counsel, Title II of HIPAA, denominated "Administrative Simplification," required Congress to pass privacy, security and electronic health care transaction standards to regulate the use of health information transmitted electronically, which, by regulation, now has been expanded to encompass health information in any form or medium. In a nutshell, the HIPAA standards, when fully implemented, are expected to and will: * simplify the administration of health insurance claims and the costs associated with those claims by encouraging the promulgation of national standards; * give patients more control over and access to their medical information; * protect individually identifiable health information from real or potential threats of disclosure through the setting and enforcing of standards; and * improve efficiency in health care delivery by standardizing electronic data interchange (EDI). Title II stated that if by December 1999, Congress failed to pass meaningful health privacy legislation, with the input of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), then HHS was required to assume the responsibility. HHS's recommendations regarding federal privacy legislation were submitted to Congress in 1997, but Congress ultimately failed to act. As a result, HHS published the Standards for Privacy of Individually Identifiable Health Information, known as the Privacy Rule, in December 2000.1 In March 2002, after receiving, reviewing and responding to more than 60,000 public comments on the rule, HHS issued proposed modifications. These changes were intended to alleviate problems with the original "final" rule that unintentionally impeded patient access to health care, while still maintaining the requirements for the privacy of individually identifiable health information. Primarily, the changes included: (1) eliminating the patient "consent" requirement, (2) modifying the definition of "marketing," (3) providing allowances for "incidental uses and disclosures" of protected health information, and (4) allowing additional time for compliance with the cumbersome business associate provisions. Finally, in mid-August 2002, after an additional comment period, HHS issued its final version of the Privacy Rule and thereby finalized the groundbreaking and controversial federal privacy regulations. For all intents and purposes, the proposed changes in the March 27, 2002, amendment were adopted. Covered entities are required to comply with the Privacy Rule's requirements on or before April 14, 2003, with the exception that small health plans are given an additional year to comply. Small health plans, by statute, are those with fewer than 50 participants and/or plans with annual receipts of $5 million or less. B. Transactions and Code Sets Rule The Privacy Rule represents only one portion of HIPAA Administrative Simplification. In fact, well before the Privacy Rule was finalized, HIPAA-covered entities and their business associates already were implementing the Standards for Electronic Transactions, known as the Transactions and Code Sets Rule, as compliance with that rule originally was required on or before October 16, 2002, except for small health plans. …
Reid Holmes - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
-
Coverage is not strongly correlated with test suite effectiveness
2014Co-Authors: Laura Inozemtseva, Reid HolmesAbstract:The Coverage of a test suite is often used as a proxy for its ability to detect faults. However, previous studies that investigated the correlation between code Coverage and test suite effectiveness have failed to reach a consensus about the nature and strength of the relationship between these test suite characteristics. Moreover, many of the studies were done with small or synthetic programs, making it unclear whether their results generalize to larger programs, and some of the studies did not account for the confounding influence of test suite size. In addition, most of the studies were done with adequate suites, which are are rare in practice, so the results may not generalize to typical test suites. We have extended these studies by evaluating the relationship between test suite size, Coverage, and effectiveness for large Java programs. Our study is the largest to date in the literature: we generated 31,000 test suites for five systems consisting of up to 724,000 lines of source code. We measured the statement Coverage, decision Coverage, and modified Condition Coverage of these suites and used mutation testing to evaluate their fault detection effectiveness. We found that there is a low to moderate correlation between Coverage and effectiveness when the number of test cases in the suite is controlled for. In addition, we found that stronger forms of Coverage do not provide greater insight into the effectiveness of the suite. Our results suggest that Coverage, while useful for identifying under-tested parts of a program, should not be used as a quality target because it is not a good indicator of test suite effectiveness.
Zhen Zhang - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
-
enhanced Condition mc dc a method for improving mc dc testing adequacy
2016Co-Authors: Haihua Yan, Xiaowei Zhang, Zhen ZhangAbstract:The Modified Condition Decision Coverage (MC/DC) test criterion is a mandatory requirement for the testing of avionics software as per the DO-178B standard. In the implementation of safety-critical software, there are many complex logics and testing requirements are relatively high. In structure-based testing, MC/DC Coverage has a strong ability to detect errors compared to decision or Condition Coverage. However, it isn't enough to prove that the implementation is correct; there may be defects still lurking in the software. In this paper we classified the flaws in Boolean expressions into four types based on the software faults model and analyzed the MC/DC sensitivity to these flaws. We found that MC/DC is not sensitive to the relational Condition boundary error. Additionally, we present a testing criteria called Enhanced-Condition-MC/DC (EC-MC/DC) as a method of improving MC/DC testing adequacy. The validity and feasibility of the method are verified by real-world open source programs.