Does free care improve adults' health? Results from a randomized controlled trial.

Does free medical care lead to better health than insurance plans that require the patient to shoulder part of the cost? In an effort to answer this question, we studied 3958 people between the ages of 14 and 61 who were free of disability that precluded work and had been randomly assigned to a set of insurance plans for three or five years. One plan provided free care; the others required enrollees to pay a share of their medical bills. As previously reported, patients in the latter group made approximately one-third fewer visits to a physician and were hospitalized about one-third less often.

Utilization review in nursing homes: making implicit level-of-care judgments explicit.

Comprehensive data on 3,579 patients in Baltimore nursing homes were collected by trained teams of reliable observers. The data included an implicit judgment about the level of care (LOC) deemed most appropriate for each patient. Two different approaches were used to fit the patient data to the LOC judgments: Several versions of an algorithm adapted from a utilization review scheme based on simple clinical criteria and a series of mathematical equations based on logistic regression were each tested.