Each state’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit prosecutes billing fraud cases against individual healthcare providers who fraudulently bill Medicaid for services provided. Once an individual is convicted of billing fraud, the Office of Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services may exclude the individual from billing any federal government healthcare program, including Medicaid. Excluded individuals are added to a public list of exclusions, which restricts their ability to practice professionally. Prompted by criminology research into the impact of policing (...) resources, we test whether these government enforcement initiatives against fraud serve as a deterrent to would-be fraudulent billers. We document that key enforcement proxies, the staffing level and budget of an MFCU, are positively associated with the yearly number of exclusions added at the state level. Our results are consistent with the exclusion list not being a deterrent but provide support for MFCUs’ fraud detection efforts. This paper provides industry-specific fraud insights for auditors and other individuals involved in public policy, specifically Medicaid, and introduces a novel dataset to the accounting fraud research literature. (shrink)

Using a comprehensive sample of U.S. non-profit hospitals from 2011 to 2015, we examine the effects of state community benefits regulation on the amount of charity care provided by and the operational efficiency of U.S. non-profit hospitals. First, we document that, under such regulations, non-profit hospitals provide more charity care and less compensated care as a proportion of net revenue. We infer from these findings that CBR has the potential to increase both non-profit hospitals’ amount of charity care and their (...) efficiency of operations. Second, by examining variation in CBR types, we find no differences between having provision or having reporting requirements on the amount of charity care offered. Moreover, when we consider CBR with both provision and reporting requirements, the combination of these two requirements does not incrementally enhance charity care offerings, suggesting that the requirements may serve as substitutes with comparable effect. Lastly, we show that several state-level characteristics influence the relationship between CBR and charity care: CBRs in states with a higher gross domestic product and percentage of revenue received in taxes have incrementally lower associations with charity care, while hospitals in states where populations have, on average, higher household incomes have greater associations between CBR and charity care. Our findings highlight the effects that state-enacted regulation can have on socially beneficial behavior by non-profits. (shrink)

El texto que presentamos recoge las principales conclusiones que han derivado de los estudios sobre la Colección de documentos árabes del Archivo Histórico Provincial de Granada. Compuesta principalmente por documentos de carácter jurídico, el análisis del contenido de cada uno de ellos en relación con la materialidad del soporte y las tintas así como la coincidencia en el diseño y planificación de la página revelan el uso de idénticos protocolos de ejecución. Esta investigación nos está permitiendo, además, establecer coincidencias relevantes (...) relacionadas con los procesos de elaboración del papel entre los últimos años de permanencia de los árabes en la Península Ibérica y los primeros tras la incorporación del territorio a la Corona de Castilla y, sobre todo, con el modo de ejecutar el documento de archivo en sus formas externa e interna. (shrink)

Despite spending more on health care than every other industrialized country, the U.S. ranks 37th in health outcomes. These differences cannot be explained away with differences in age and income, or even with quality of care. And, the rate of growth in health care spending in the U.S. continues to increase. The share of the Gross Domestic Product attributable to health care grew from 9% in 1980 to more than 17% in 2011. Health care costs are projected to account for (...) more than one-fifth of our economy by 2021. Despite spending more and more, the U.S. does not have better health outcomes than other countries. Worse, our increasing spending is largely attributable to preventable conditions. More than 85 cents of every dollar spent on health in the U.S. are spent on the treatment and management of chronic diseases, such as those caused by preventable conditions related to obesity and tobacco use. (shrink)

The distinctive security features of the Spanish electronic national identity card, known as Documento Nacional de Identidad electrónico, allow us to propose the usage of this cryptographic smart card in an authentication framework that can be used during the registration and login phases of internet services where the validation of the user’s age and real identity are key elements, as it is the case for example of the so-called social networks. Using this mechanism with NFC-capable devices, the identity and age (...) of the potential user can be determined, allowing or denying the access to the service based on that information. (shrink)

ABSTRACTRecent research on moral dynamics shows that an individual's ethical mind-set moderates the impact of an initial ethical or unethical act on the likelihood of behaving ethically on a subsequent occasion. More specifically, an outcome-based mind-set facilitates Moral Balancing, whereas a rule-based mind-set facilitates Moral Consistency. The objective was to look at the evolution of moral choice across a series of scenarios, that is, to explore if these moral patterns are maintained over time. The results of three studies showed that (...) Moral Balancing is not.. (shrink)

A survey is given of the concepts of interaction (force) and matter, i.e., of process and substance. The development of these concepts, first in antiquity, then in early modern times, and finally in the contemporary system of quantum field theory is described. After a summary of the basic phenomenological attributes (coupling strengths, symmetry quantities, charges), the common ground of concepts of quantum field theory for both interactions and matter entities is discussed. Then attention is focused on the gauge principle which (...) has been developed to describe all interaction fields in the same way, and hopefully to unite them all into one unified field. While a similar unification of all fundamental types of matter fields (quarks and leptons) into one family may be possible (SU 5), there still remains at this level a duality between interaction quanta (bosons with spin 1) and matter particles (fermions with spin 1/2). Whether this duality may be removed in some future supersymmetric theory is not discussed in this paper. Nor is Quantum Gravitation discussed, though the analogy of the gauge principle for the three fundamental non-gravitational interactions (hadronic, electromagnetic and weak) to Einstein's principle of equivalence for gravitation in spacetime is noted. However, the equivalence concept is applied not to spacetime but to the internal spaces for the matter (or charge) fields which are the sources between which the fundamental interactions operate. The gauge principle states that a change in the measures of the internal space charge of gauge or phases of the matter fields is equivalent to, and can be compensated by, suitably introduced interaction fields. From such an interaction field, the gauge potential field in the internal space, one may derive a gauge force field by exterior differentiation.Geometrically, the collection of all internal spaces, one over each point of spacetime, constitutes a fiber bundle. The gauge potential field represents a connection on the fiber bundle, and the gauge force field is the curvature (calculated by taking the exterior derivative of the connection and adding to it the exterior product of the connection with itself). Thus, just as gravitational force is interpreted as spacetime curvature, so the three other fundamental forces are interpretable as internal space curvature. The Standard Model which unites the three non-gravitational fields into an SU c 3 ×SU 2×U 1 structure, and the grand unified model, SU 5, are discussed briefly, and difficulties are noted. Finally it is suggested that a composite model, based on more subtle structure, may be needed to remove the present obscurities and difficulties that stand in the way of a unified theory. (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to both discuss commands as a species of speech act and to discuss commands within the broader framework of how they are used and ...

This book presents the current feminist critique of science and the philosophy of science in such a way that students of philosophy of science, philosophers, feminist theorists, and scientists will find the material accessible and intellectually rigorous.Contemporary feminist debate, as well as the debate brought on by the radical critics of science, assumes—incorrectly—that certain movements in philosophy of science and science-driven theory are understood in their dynamics as well as in their details. All too often, labels such as “Kuhnian” or (...) “positivistic” are taken for granted, and much of the contemporary postmodern or post-structuralist feminist theory that sets out to criticize science does little to alleviate the reader’s lack of knowledge with regard to such movements.Unlike other texts, Philosophies of Science: Feminist Theories provides a student-oriented framework so that, for example, positivism is given a thorough grounding before the feminist critique of such epistemological theory is given. Other movements discussed include the Kuhnian turn, sociology of science, and the radical critique of science. Feminist theory and critique are interwoven throughout, with one chapter devoted to feminist thought, which includes the work of such thinkers as Longino, Hararway, Hubbard, Nelson, Harding, and Keller. (shrink)

Within Ajzen's Planned Behavior Theory framework, this article tests a model to estimate the predictors of entrepreneurial intention in academic scientists working in Chile. We adapted into Spanish the entrepreneurship intention questionnaire. We tested the entrepreneurship intention model on a sample of 1,027 scientists leading research projects funded by the Chilean Scientific and Technological Development Fund, the country's primary scientific research grant. The results show strong empirical support for the entrepreneurship intention model proposed while highlighting some critical issues specific to (...) entrepreneurial intention in scientists. In particular, we found an indirect effect of perceived subjective social support on entrepreneurial intention, which is mediated by entrepreneurial attitude and perceived behavioral control toward entrepreneurship. These results suggest that policies orientated toward promoting academic entrepreneurship should include developing a healthy social environment toward it, meaning that entrepreneurial intention is not only an individual but an organizational challenge. These policies should analyze the social norms guiding the scientists' reference groups to increase their effectiveness. (shrink)

In this paper, I will identify two problems of trust in an AI-relevant context: a theoretical problem and a practical one. I will identify and address a number of skeptical challenges to an AI-relevant theory of trust. In addition, I will identify what I shall term the ‘scope challenge’, which I take to hold for any AI-relevant theory of trust that purports to be representationally adequate to the multifarious forms of trust and AI. Thereafter, I will suggest how trust-engineering, a (...) position that is intermediate between the modified pure rational-choice account and an account that gives rise to trustworthy AI, might allow us to address the practical problem of trust, before identifying and critically evaluating two candidate trust-engineering approaches. (shrink)

This study constructs a measurement scale for Socially Responsible Consumption in the particular context of Colombia. It uses a mixed qualitative and quantitative methodological approach, beginning with four focus groups and ending with a quantitative validation exercise employing Exploratory Factor Analysis. The result is a Socially Responsible Consumption measurement scale consisting of four dimensions that reflect paradigms found in the existing literature. These are, however, expressed differently in Colombia. In particular, Socially Responsible Consumption involves consumer behavior that favors corporate social (...) responsibility practices and the rational consumption of resources and products while recognizing the importance of maintaining a healthy lifestyle through healthcare. (shrink)

This is a thorough treatment of first-order modal logic. The book covers such issues as quantification, equality (including a treatment of Frege's morning star/evening star puzzle), the notion of existence, non-rigid constants and function symbols, predicate abstraction, the distinction between nonexistence and nondesignation, and definite descriptions, borrowing from both Fregean and Russellian paradigms.