The ACA shifted U.S. health policy from centering on principles of actuarial fairness toward social solidarity. Yet four legal fixtures of the health care system have prevented the achievement of social solidarity: federalism, fiscal pluralism, privatization, and individualism. Future reforms must confront these fixtures to realize social solidarity in health care, American-style.

Out-of-network air ambulance bills are a pernicious and financially devastating type of surprise medical bill. Courts have broadly interpreted the Airline Deregulation Act to preempt most state attempts to regulate air ambulance billing abuses, so a federal solution is ultimately needed. However, in the absence of a federal fix, states have experimented with a variety of approaches that may survive preemption and provide some protections for their citizens.

... diflblved his name into that <)f Parthenio Etyro, and fell to writing pfalms , lifes of J. and the faints, prayers and meditations. ...

Health care costs and affordability are critical issues to consumers. Just as we assess the coverage impacts of a health reform proposal, we should be able to evaluate how the plan will constrain health care costs: its theory of cost control. This essay provides a framework to assess health reform plans on their theories of cost control, identifying the key policy tools to constrain health care costs organized in a two-by-two matrix across the following dimensions: price vs. utilization and public (...) vs. private payers. It then applies the framework to the Affordable Care Act and the Republican's 2017 legislative efforts to repeal and replace the ACA to identify their general theories of cost control, revealing on the plans' strengths, blind spots, and incoherence. (shrink)

Researchers now commonly collect biospecimens for genomic analysis together with information from mobile devices and electronic health records. This rich combination of data creates new opportunities for understanding and addressing important health issues, but also intensifies challenges to privacy and confidentiality. Here, we elucidate the “web” of legal protections for precision medicine research by integrating findings from qualitative interviews with structured legal research and applying them to realistic research scenarios involving various privacy threats.

Among multiple legal challenges to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) is the premise that PPACA's “individual mandate” (requiring all individuals to obtain health insurance by 2014 or face civil penalties) is inviolate of Congress' interstate commerce powers because Congress lacks the power to regulate commercial “inactivity.” Several courts initially considering this argument have rejected it, but federal district courts in Virginia and Florida have concurred, leading to numerous appeals and prospective review of the United States Supreme Court. (...) Despite creative arguments, the dispositive constitutional question is not whether Congress' interstate commerce power extends to commercial inactivity. Rather, it is whether Congress may regulate individual decisions with significant economic ramifications in the interests of protecting and promoting the public's health. This article offers a counter-interpretation of the scope of Congress' interstate commerce power to regulate in furtherance of the public's health. (shrink)

Despite historic efforts to enact the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in 2010, national health reform is threatened by multiple legal challenges grounded in constitutional law. Premier among these claims is the premise that PPACA’s “individual mandate” is constitutionally infirm. Attorneys General in Virginia and Florida allege that Congress’ interstate commerce powers do not authorize federal imposition of the individual mandate because Congress lacks the power to regulate commercial “inactivity.” Stated simply, Congress cannot regulate individuals who choose not to (...) obtain health insurance because they are not engaged in a commercial venture. Several courts initially considering this argument have rejected it, but two federal district courts in Virginia and Florida have concurred, leading to numerous appeals and the near promise of United States Supreme Court review. (shrink)

According to Svein Eng there are propositions concerning the law which are descriptive as well as normative, but cannot be separated into one descriptive and one normative proposition. Eng calls these propositions “fused” (“sammensmeltede”). In Eng's theory a proposition with “fused modality” is partly descriptive and partly normative, but cannot be classified as a separable combination of a claim about what the law “is” and a claim about what the law “ought to be.” In a “fused” proposition modality is a (...) question of “degree.” The purpose of this article is to show why Eng's theory should be rejected. The introduction of “fused modality” adds nothing of value to legal theory. Eng claims to have discovered a class of propositions not previously accounted for, but this is not the case. The lawyer Eng talks about as making a “fused” proposition is simply a lawyer logically confused. (shrink)

Disabled women's issues, experiences, and embodiments have been misunderstood, if not largely ignored, by feminist as well as mainstream disability theorists. The reason for this, I argue, is embedded in the use of materialist and constructivist approaches to bodies that do not recognize the interaction between “sex” and “gender” and “impairment” and “disability” as material-semiotic. Until an interactionist paradigm is taken up, we will not be able to uncover fully the intersection between sexist and ableist biases that form disabled women's (...) oppressions. Relying on the understanding that sexuality is one such material-semiotic phenomenon, I examine the operation of interwoven biases in two disabled women's narratives. (shrink)

: Disabled women's issues, experiences, and embodiments have been misunderstood, if not largely ignored, by feminist as well as mainstream disability theorists. The reason for this, I argue, is embedded in the use of materialist and constructivist approaches to bodies that do not recognize the interaction between "sex" and "gender" and "impairment" and "disability" as material-semiotic. Until an interactionist paradigm is taken up, we will not be able to uncover fully the intersection between sexist and ableist biases (among others) that (...) form disabled women's oppressions. Relying on the understanding that sexuality is one such material-semiotic phenomenon, I examine the operation of interwoven biases in two disabled women's narratives. (shrink)

Please imagine a long fuse hanging down from the ceiling. It is a carefully woven tube of fabric that holds a core of gunpowder. We note that it is beautifully made, with brightly colored threads intertwined with the coarser bare cotton. It a masterpiece of the modern weaver's art.

. In this reply to Dahlman, the focus is on aspects that I take to be of general interest. The point to be emphasised is the absence of a critically reflexive mode of questioning on the part of Dahlman and, in general, on the part of the position he represents, namely, an empiricist and logical paradigm of atemporal cognition and control. It is argued that lawyers’ thinking de lege lata—with its distinctive connection to normativity and morals, through the unity of (...) the temporal and institutional dimensions in fused modality—can never be understood within such a framework. (shrink)

In this note I construct a proper o-minimal expansion of the ordered additive group of rationals.

This volume presents Rosenberg's previously published studies of the central elements and implications of Sellars' philosophy, along with three new essays that ...

In this article, we describe a longitudinal inquiry into what it means to be a person in our contemporary world. Our method constitutes a dynamic, non-objectifying fusion of empirical and philosophical anthropology. Field-based anthropology examines actualities: how people lead their lives and talk about them. Philosophical anthropology addresses possibilities: who and what people could become in light of actualities while not being determined by them. We describe and illustrate our fieldwork in the classrooms of 16 teachers who work in New (...) York City public schools. We have sought in our observations to identify and think about signs or expressions of persons-in-the-making. We also touch on a series of dinner-discussions we have held with the teachers. These meetings have centered on the question of becoming a person in today’s political and cultural environment, and how education figures into the equation. Finally, we also describe the weekly meetings we have held as a research team, in which we engage the play of concepts and percepts. We close with remarks on the conceptual and existential ties that can link philosophy and fieldwork in schools. (shrink)

Extreme self-sacrifice in the context of phenomena, such as sports hooliganism, combines aspects of local and extended fusion. How can we best account for such phenomena in the light of the theory presented here, and how can we make a tangible distinction between the two types? I propose ways to explore and operationalize this distinction and the concept of fusion more generally.

This article presents an argument for the use of interpretative hermeneutic phenomenology as an insightful and innovative methodology for research in early childhood education. In providing guidance for the use of this methodology, this article will focus on a doctoral study investigating preschool teachers’ experiences of engagement with a continuing professional development (CPD) programme aimed to inform their pedagogical practice. The CPD programme focused on promoting and supporting inclusive pedagogy, practice and culture in the early education setting. The research study (...) considered the phenomenon of engagement with the programme on participants’ perceptions and practices of inclusion with the emphasis on their “lived experience” working in practice with young children. Findings from the research, validated by the philosophical principles of Heidegger, illustrate the importance of consideration of participants’ individual contextual realities when addressing teacher education through acknowledgment of other perspectives that influence the effectiveness of the learning experience. The professional identity of the early years’ educator and societal perception of this role is presented as having a direct influence on participants’ engagement with the CPD programme. Interpretive phenomenology and the hermeneutic principles underpinning this approach are presented here as central to understanding the professional role and the subsequent development of effective teacher education in the early years. (shrink)

This book offers new insights into the nature of human rational capacities by engaging inferentialism with empirical research in the cognitive sciences. Inferentialism advocates that humans' unique kind of intelligence is discursive and rooted in competencies to make, assess and justify claims. This approach provides a rich source of valuable insights into the nature of our rational capacities, but it is underdeveloped in important respects. For example, little attempt has been made to assess inferentialism considering relevant scientific research on human (...) communication, cognition or reasoning. By engaging philosophical and scientific approaches in a productive dialogue, this book shows how we can better understand human rational capacities by comparing their respective strengths and weaknesses. In this vein, the author critically revisits and constructively develops central themes from the work of Robert Brandom and other language rationalists: the nature of the assertoric practice and its connection to reasoned discourse, the linguistic constitution of the shared space of reasons, the social nature and function of reasoning, the intersubjective roots of social-normative practices and the nature of objective thought. Practices of Reason will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and philosophy of logic. (shrink)

Face detection plays important roles in many applications such as human–computer interaction, security and surveillance, face recognition, etc. This article presents an intelligent enhanced fused approach for face recognition based on the Voronoi diagram and wavelet moment invariants. Discrete wavelet transform and moment invariants are used for feature extraction of the facial face. Finally, VD and the dual tessellation are used to locate and detect original face images. Face recognition results based on this new fusion are promising in the state (...) of the art. (shrink)

Since the emergence of computing as a mode of investigation in the sciences, computational approaches have revolutionised many fields of inquiry. Recently in philosophy, the question has begun rendering bit by bit—could computation be considered a deeper fundamental building block to all of reality? This paper proposes a continuum computing construct, predicated on a set of core computational principles: computability, discretisation, stability and optimisation. The construct is applied to the set of most fundamental physical laws, in the form of non-relativistic (...) conservation equations which underpin our governing physics. The discretisation approach divides all of space into a mesh of discrete computational cells, and evolution of data in those cells must obey pre-defined stability conditions from established continuum computing theory, namely, the Courant–Friedrichs–Lewy condition. Evolving cell-state data in a manner which logically optimises computational efficiency, combined with the defined stability condition, the construct derives a central coupling of space, time, and the fastest speed of information propagation. This coupling formed at the lowest level by the computing construct, naturally and inherently produces aspects of special relativity and general relativity at the macroscale. This paper therefore proposes a new explanation of why the nature of space and time may be fused, and explores simple emergent congruities with relativity. The theory invites us to reverse the philosophical premise of the original Simulation Argument. This argument currently leads us to consider: how might all of the observed physics of our reality be reproduced computationally in a simulation of our existence? This work asks instead: could foundations of the physics of our universe—namely spacetime coupling—emerge inherently, and necessarily, from fundamental principles of computation? (shrink)

For pragmatic reasons more attention should be devoted to the serious study of religion. Although religions inspire great achievements of human creativity, it is important to understand them because they also promote violence and warfare. One can understand the unacceptable face of religion when one sees why religions matter to those who belong to them; why they are bound to be conservative, especially in times of stress; and why, therefore, believers become very passionate about defending the boundaries of their particular (...) religious systems. Such understanding provides a realistic basis for working toward the peaceful coexistence of conflicting religious systems. (shrink)

There are many fine things in Alvin I. Goldman's paper 'Toward a Theory of Social Power' - much ingenuity, a good deal of exact careful thinking, some splendid feats of quasi-symbolical construction. There are also at least two places where the wiring short-circuits.

The ancient Greeks already used to give ethnic names to their different scales, and observations on differences in music of the various nations always raised the interest of musicians and philosophers. Yet, it was only in the late nineteenth century that “comparative musicology” became an institutional science. An important role in this process was played by Carl Stumpf, a former pupil of Brentano’s who pioneered these researches in Berlin. Stumpf founded the Phonogrammarchiv to collect recordings of folk and extra-European music (...) and a dedicated journal, the Sammelbände für vergleichende Musikwissenschaft. Gifted in the field of science no less than in that of musicology, Stumpf developed an empirically-oriented approach to phenomenology, deeply divergent from Husserl’s and highly influential over the Berlin school of Gestalt psychology. A self-declared “outsider” among armchair philosophers, Stumpf experimentally investigated the perception of sounds and the origins of musical consonance. Developing the physiological studies of Ernst Weber on the sense of touch, Stumpf discovered that two sensations of tone, given at the same time, tend to mix in a certain degree. Musical consonance – he claimed – lays in this level of “tonal fusion”, not in the allegedly “natural” series of the harmonic partials of a vibrating chord, as suggested by the naturalists of all times from Pythagoras to Stumpf’s great contemporary Hermann Helmholtz. Accordingly, no musical system can claim for preponderance over the others: Stumpf’s researches in comparative musicology served to corroborate his theses on “tonal fusion” and the psychological foundations of consonance. Although Stumpf later revised and finally abandoned this theory, its permanent value lays in its opposition to dominant naturalistic approaches. The commitment for comparative musicology at the Berlin School is then no concession to a positivistic fashion for exoticism. The fundamentally Eurocentric stance of naturalistic theories of music is also fiercely contrasted by Stumpf’s pupil Erich Hornbostel, who suggests that music ought to be considered as culture, rather than as nature, and focuses attention on the eventually melting human cultures. The Berlin school flourished until the Nazis forced most of its exponents to emigration and, for tragically obvious reasons, heavily discouraged researches on these topics. (shrink)

In 1981, William S. Burroughs—often considered a writer of devastatingly apocalyptic dystopian vision—published “Cities of the Red Night,” his first foray into utopian writing. This article examines Burroughs’s conception of the “retroactive utopia.” It highlights Burroughs’s ambivalence toward utopian projects and invokes both his hope and his disappointment in the ability for utopian writing to engender political change.

The last three decades have seen a renaissance in Anglo-American philosophy of efforts to think of human reasoning as constitutively social and, indeed, discursive. This approach does not see reaso...

The scale of know­ledge is growing rapidly in the big data environment, and traditional know­ledge organization and services have faced the dilemma of semantic inaccuracy and untimeliness. From a know­ledge fusion perspective-combining the precise semantic superiority of traditional ontology with the large-scale graph processing power and the predicate attribute expression ability of property graph-this paper presents an ontology and property graph fusion framework (OPGFF). The fusion process is divided into content layer fusion and constraint layer fusion. The result of the (...) fusion, that is, the know­ledge representation model is called know­ledge big graph. In addition, this paper applies the know­ledge big graph model to the ownership network in the China’s financial field and builds a financial ownership know­ledge big graph. Furthermore, this paper designs and implements six consistency inference algorithms for finding contradictory data and filling in missing data in the financial ownership know­ledge big graph, five of which are completely domain agnostic. The correctness and validity of the algorithms have been experimentally verified with actual data. The fusion OPGFF framework and the implementation method of the know­ledge big graph could provide technical reference for big data know­ledge organization and services. (shrink)

The last three decades have seen a renaissance in Anglo-American philosophy of efforts to think of human reasoning as constitutively social and, indeed, discursive. This approach does not see reaso...

“Source monitoring” theory is applied to the turn-of-the-century argument that, whenever binocularly fused patterns are self-consciously apperceived, both eyes' monocular sensations are consciously perceived. According to monitoring theory's refinement of the argument, binocularly apperceived patterns are accompanied by selfconsciousness that one is perceiving patterns , whereas monocular sensations are accompanied by no self-consciousness of their source. In the current test of this refined argument, 32 subjects were monocularly presented with 6 letters of the alphabet, while binocularly fusing 6 different letters, (...) and were subsequently required to discriminate these 12 letters from 6 other letters that they had visually imaged. Consistent with monitoring theory, the results of experimental testing suggest that binocularly fused letters are neurally monitored as “peripheral,” self-consciously experienced as “perceived,” and subsequently remembered as not “imaged.” The results further suggest that, during such binocular apperception, monocular data are not totally unconscious-like computer data-but are consciously experienced as “sourceless” sensations that are memorially confused with visually imaged sensations. (shrink)

In the current ongoing Terror War, both George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden deploy certain similar figures of speech, fusing their metaphysical and political discourses while reserving the demonology. In his speech to Congress on September 20, 2001 declaring his war against terrorism, Bush described the conflict as a war between freedom and fear. The coming Terror War was, he explained, a conflict between “those governed by fear” who “want to destroy our wealth and freedoms,” and those on the (...) side of freedom. Bush insisted that “you’re either with us, or you’re with the terrorists,” and laid down a series of non-negotiable demands to the Taliban while Congress wildly applauded. Bush’s popularity soared with a country craving blood-revenge and the head of Osama bin Laden. Moreover, proclaiming what his administration and commentators would describe as “the Bush doctrine,” Bush also asserted that his administration held accountable those nations who supported terrorism –- a position that could nurture and legitimate military interventions for years to come. (shrink)