Healthcare reform.

Catholic social teaching provides the essential framework for thinking clearly about societal problems, but it cannot be applied like a recipe in a cookbook. It is the responsibility of informed citizens to take what Catholic social teaching offers and use their own knowledge and reason to advance concrete approaches for addressing complex issues of public policy. In health care, full governmental control would lead to a decline in the quality of services provided to all patients.

Economic model of a birth cohort screening program for hepatitis C virus.

Unlabelled: Recent research has identified high hepatitis C virus (HCV) prevalence among older U.S. residents who contracted HCV decades ago and may no longer be recognized as high risk.

Projecting the future diabetes population size and related costs for the U.S.

Objective: We developed a novel population-level model for projecting future direct spending on diabetes. The model can be used in the federal budget process to estimate the cost implications of alternative policies.

Research Design And Methods: We constructed a Markov model simulating individuals' movement across different BMI categories, the incidence of diabetes and screening, and the natural history of diabetes and its complications over the next 25 years.

Using clinical information to project federal health care spending.

Complications from chronic illnesses often do not emerge for many years. Current federal cost projection methods are constrained by ten-year cost estimates, which capture increases in near-term intervention costs but not changes in long-term costs. Current methods also cannot easily capture the cost implications of changes in disease progression.