This brief examines changes in consumer health plan cost-sharing--deductibles, copayments, coinsurance, and out-of-pocket limits--for coverage offered in the Affordable Care Act's marketplaces between 2015 and 2016. Three of seven measures studied rose moderately in 2016, an increase attributable in part to a shift in the mix of plans offered in the marketplaces, from plans with higher actuarial value (platinum and gold plans) to those that have less generous coverage (bronze and silver plans). Nearly 60 percent of enrollees in marketplace plans receive cost-sharing reductions as part of income-based assistance. For enrollees without cost-sharing reductions, average copayments, deductibles, and out-of-pocket limits remain considerably higher under bronze and silver plans than under employer-based plans; cost-sharing is similar in gold plans and employer plans. Marketplace plans are more likely than employer-based plans to impose a deductible for prescription drugs but no less likely to do so for primary care visits.
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Med Phys
January 2025
OncoRay - National Center for Radiation Research in Oncology, Faculty of Medicine and University Hospital Carl Gustav Carus, Technische Universität Dresden, Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden - Rossendorf, Dresden, Germany.
Background: Patient-specific quality assurance (PSQA) is a crucial yet resource-intensive task in proton therapy, requiring special equipment, expertise and additional beam time. Machine delivery log files contain information about energy, position and monitor units (MU) of all delivered spots, allowing a reconstruction of the applied dose. This raises the prospect of phantomless, log file-based QA (LFQA) as an automated replacement of current phantom-based solutions, provided that such an approach guarantees a comparable level of safety.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAtten Percept Psychophys
January 2025
Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University, 225 Psychology Building, 1835 Neil Ave, Columbus, OH, 43210, USA.
Humans can learn to attentionally suppress salient, irrelevant information when it consistently appears at a predictable location. While this ability confers behavioral benefits by reducing distraction, the full scope of its utility is unknown. As people locomote and/or shift between task contexts, known-to-be-irrelevant locations may change from moment to moment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGeroscience
January 2025
Department of Neurology, Ewha Womans University Mokdong Hospital, Ewha Womans University College of Medicine, Seoul, Republic of Korea.
Background: Superagers, older adults with exceptional cognitive abilities, show preserved brain structure compared to typical older adults. We investigated whether superagers have biologically younger brains based on their structural integrity.
Methods: A cohort of 153 older adults (aged 61-93) was recruited, with 63 classified as superagers based on superior episodic memory and 90 as typical older adults, of whom 64 were followed up after two years.
Cardiovasc Eng Technol
January 2025
Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA, Cambridge, USA.
Purpose: Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common chronic cardiac arrhythmia that increases the risk of stroke, primarily due to thrombus formation in the left atrial appendage (LAA). Left atrial appendage occlusion (LAAO) devices offer an alternative to oral anticoagulation for stroke prevention. However, the complex and variable anatomy of the LAA presents significant challenges to device design and deployment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEur J Nucl Med Mol Imaging
January 2025
The First Affiliated Hospital of Wenzhou Medical University, Wenzhou, 325000, China.
Purpose: The study explores the role of multimodal imaging techniques, such as [F]F-PSMA-1007 PET/CT and multiparametric MRI (mpMRI), in predicting the ISUP (International Society of Urological Pathology) grading of prostate cancer. The goal is to enhance diagnostic accuracy and improve clinical decision-making by integrating these advanced imaging modalities with clinical variables. In particular, the study investigates the application of few-shot learning to address the challenge of limited data in prostate cancer imaging, which is often a common issue in medical research.
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