Providers Paid Substantially Less By Marketplace Nongroup Insurers Than By Employer Small-Group Plans, 2021.

Numerous studies show that employer plans pay providers significantly more than Medicare, but less is known about prices in nongroup plans sold both on and off the Marketplaces established by the Affordable Care Act (ACA), where narrow networks and low-cost insurers are more prevalent. We estimated prices for three market segments (Marketplace nongroup, off-Marketplace nongroup, and employer small group) and three types of services (professional, outpatient hospital, and inpatient hospital) relative to a Medicare benchmark. We used 2021 claims data covering virtually all enrollment in ACA risk-adjusted plans.

Mapping of specialized metabolite terms onto a plant phylogeny using text mining and large language models.

Plants produce a staggering array of chemicals that are the basis for organismal function and important human nutrients and medicines. However, it is poorly defined how these compounds evolved and are distributed across the plant kingdom, hindering a systematic view and understanding of plant chemical diversity. Recent advances in plant genome/transcriptome sequencing have provided a well-defined molecular phylogeny of plants, on which the presence of diverse natural products can be mapped to systematically determine their phylogenetic distribution.

Health Insurance For People Younger Than Age 65: Expiration Of Temporary Policies Projected To Reshuffle Coverage, 2023-33.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that in 2023, 248 million people in the US who are younger than age sixty-five have health insurance coverage (mostly through employment-based plans), and twenty-three million people, or 8.3 percent of that age group, are uninsured-with significant variations in coverage by income and, to a lesser extent, by race and ethnicity. The unprecedented low uninsurance rate is largely attributable to temporary policies that kept beneficiaries enrolled in Medicaid and enhanced the subsidies available through the health insurance Marketplaces during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Association Between Treatment by Fraud and Abuse Perpetrators and Health Outcomes Among Medicare Beneficiaries.

Importance: Fraud and abuse contribute to unnecessary spending in the Medicare program, and federal agencies have prioritized fund recovery and the exclusion of health care practitioners who violate policy. However, the human costs of fraud and abuse in terms of patient health are unknown.

Objective: To assess whether Medicare beneficiaries' receipt of health care services from fraud and abuse perpetrators (FAPs) is associated with worse health outcomes.

Do health insurance and hospital market concentration influence hospital patients' experience of care?

Objective: To examine the effects of insurance and hospital market concentration on hospital patients' experience of care, as hospitals may compete on quality for favorable insurance contracts.

Data Sources/study Setting: Secondary data for 2008-2015 on patient experience from Hospital Compare's patient survey data, hospital characteristics from the American Hospital Association (AHA) Annual Survey, and insurance market characteristics from HealthLeaders-InterStudy.

Study Design: Hospital/year-level regressions predict each hospital's patient experience measure as a function of insurance and hospital market concentration and hospital fixed effects.

Medicare Beneficiaries' Exposure To Fraud And Abuse Perpetrators.

In the period 2012-15, 1,364 fraud and abuse perpetrators (FAPs) treated over 1.2 million Medicare beneficiaries and received more than $630 million in Medicare payments. Compared to beneficiaries treated by non-FAPs, beneficiaries exposed to FAPs were more likely to be nonwhite, dually enrolled in Medicaid, and disabled and younger than age sixty-five.

Caveolin-1 is an aggresome-inducing protein.

Caveolin-1 (Cav1) drives the formation of flask-shaped membrane invaginations known as caveolae that participate in signaling, clathrin-independent endocytosis and mechanotransduction. Overexpression or mutations of Cav1 can lead to its mistrafficking, including its accumulation in a perinuclear compartment previously identified as the Golgi complex. Here, we show that in the case of overexpressed Cav1-GFP, this perinuclear compartment consists of cytoplasmic inclusion bodies generated in response to the accumulation of aggregates of misfolded proteins, known as aggresomes.

Developing a Patient-Centered Benefit-Risk Survey: A Community-Engaged Process.

Objectives: To provide a community-engaged process to inform the design of a stated-preferences experiment. The process involved integrating patients and caregivers of people with Duchenne/Becker muscular dystrophy, advocates, clinicians, and the sponsor in conceptualizing and developing a benefit-risk survey on the basis of phase III trial results.

Methods: Our community-engagement process for the development of a stated-preference survey included a set of five guiding principles with a foundation in the principles of community-engaged research.

Overexpression of caveolin-1 is sufficient to phenocopy the behavior of a disease-associated mutant.

Mutations and alterations in caveolin-1 expression levels have been linked to a number of human diseases. How misregulation of caveolin-1 contributes to disease is not fully understood, but has been proposed to involve the intracellular accumulation of mutant forms of the protein. To better understand the molecular basis for trafficking defects that trap caveolin-1 intracellularly, we compared the properties of a GFP-tagged version of caveolin-1 P132L, a mutant form of caveolin-1 previously linked to breast cancer, with wild-type caveolin-1.

Cellular stress triggers TEL nuclear export via two genetically separable pathways.

TEL (translocation ets leukemia, also known as ETV6) is a repressor of transcription that is disrupted by the t(12;21), which is the most frequent chromosomal translocation in pediatric acute lymphocytic leukemia. TEL is modified by SUMOylation, and the lysine (Lys 99) that is conjugated to SUMO is required for TEL nuclear export. In addition, TEL is phosphorylated by p38 kinase, which is activated by cellular stress.

Non-traditional roles for the Adenomatous Polyposis Coli (APC) tumor suppressor protein.

The Adenomatous Polyposis Coli (APC) tumor suppressor is a multifunctional protein that is mutated in a majority of colon cancers. The role of APC as an antagonist of the Wnt signaling pathway is well known and it is widely accepted that inappropriate activation of this pathway through loss of APC function contributes to the progression of colon cancers. However, a body of evidence is growing to support the idea that APC plays non-traditional functions outside of the Wnt pathway with roles in cell migration, adhesion, chromosome segregation, spindle assembly, apoptosis, and neuronal differentiation.