Resource-Based Relative Value Scale - Resource-Based Relative Value Scale Resource-Based Relative Value Scale (RBRVS) is a scheme used to determine how much money doctors should be paid. It is currently used my Medicare (United States) in the United States and by several HMOs. RBRVS gives every action a doctor makes (eg. procedures, referals, etc.) a relative value. This is multiplied by a conversion factor (in dollars) to find what the doctor should be paid. History RBRVS was created at Harvard in their national RBRVS study from December 1985 and completed on September 29, 1988. At that time, it was submitted to the HCFA (today the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS) to be used in the American Medicare system. In December of the following year, President George H. W..
Goodness and value theory - Goodness and value theory Theories of Value ask 'What sorts of things are good?' Or: 'What does "good" mean?' Or: 'If we had to give the most general, catch-all description of good things, then what would that description be?' Many people believe value theory is the most important area of philosophy. It can define "good" and "bad" for a community or society. It affects everyone's life - maybe all life on Earth. The field of political economy is also very concerned with these decisions as they play out in politics especially in its role of economic regulator and stage-setter. When governments decide what is good, they encourage it by cutting taxes on those activities, removing regulations or laws, and providing subsidies. Table of contents showTocToggle("show","hide") 1 Moral.
Comprehensive Program for Socialist Economic Integration - of Comecon countries as a whole; for individual members it ranged from 45 to 50 percent in the case of Hungary, Romania, and the Soviet Union, to 83 percent for Cuba and 96 percent for Mongolia. Trade among the members was negotiated on an annual basis and in considerable detail at the governmental level and was then followed up by interenterprise contracts. Early Comecon efforts to facilitate trade among members concentrated on development of uniform technical, legal, and statistical standards and on encouragement of long-term trade agreements. The 1971 Comprehensive Program sought to liberalize the system somewhat by recommending broad limits to "fixed-quota" trade among members (trade subject to quantitative or value targets set by bilateral trade agreements). Section VI, Paragraph 19 of the Comprehensive Program affirms that "mutual trade in.
Weimar Republic - volunteer soldiers, culminating in the beating deaths of Luxemburg and Liebknecht on January 15. With the affirmation of Ebert, the murderers were tried not before a civil court, but a military court, leading to very lenient sentences, which did not exactly lead to more acceptance for Ebert on the left wing either. The National Assembly elections took place January 19, 1919. In this time, the new left-wing parties, including the USPD and KPD, were barely able to get themselves organized, leading to a solid majority of seats for the moderate forces. To avoid the ongoing fights in Berlin, the National Assembly convened in the city of Weimar, giving the future Republic its unofficial name. The Weimar Constituion created a republic under a semi-presidential system with the Reichstag elected by proportional representation..
Renewable energy - - a house owner in cloudy Europe needs to cover 10 square meters of roof with solar panels. The disadvantage of renewables is their impact on local environments and their visibility to everybody. Some people dislike the aesthetics of wind turbines or bring up nature conservation issues when it comes to large solar-electric installations outside of cities. However, it is up to the imagination of the people to utilize these renewable technologies in an efficient and aesthetically pleasing way: fixed solar collectors can double as noise barriers along highways, roof-tops are available already and could even be replaced totally by solar collectors, etc. Moreover, it is important to realize that any environmental impact (space consumption, noise emission, etc) can be solved by the local people who are affected. It is also.
Porter generic strategies - the strength or core competency of the firm. In particular he identified two competencies that he felt were most important: product differentiation and product cost (efficiency). He originally ranked each of the three dimensions (level of differentiation, relative product cost, and scope of target market) as either low, medium, or high, and juxtaposed them in a three dimensional matrix. That is, the category scheme was displayed as a 3 by 3 by 3 cube. But most of the 27 combinations were not viable. Porter’s Generic Strategies In his 1980 classic Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analysing Industries and Competitors, Porter simplifies the scheme by reducing it down to the three best strategies. They are cost leadership, differentiation, and market segmentation (or focus). Market segmentation is narrow in scope while both cost leadership.
Marketing research - research: Marketing research - Marketing research (also called "consumer research") comprises a form of applied sociological study which concentrates on understanding the behaviours, whims and preferences, mainly current and future, of consumers in a market-based economy. Market research - Market research has a broad scope and includes all aspects of the business environment. It asks questions about competitorss, market structure, government regulations, economic trends, technological advances, and numerous other factors that make up the business environment. (See Environmental scanning.) Sometimes the term refers more particularly to the financial analysis of companies, industries, or sectors. In this case, financial analysts usually carry out the research and provide the results to investment advisors and potential investors. Product research - This looks at what products can be produced with available technology, and what new.
Market dominance strategies - are a type of marketing strategy that classifies firms based on their market share or dominance of an industry. Table of contents showTocToggle("show","hide") 1 What is market dominance? 2 Market dominance strategies 2.1 Market leader 2.2 Market challenger 2.3 Market follower 2.4 Market nicher 3 See Also 4 Finding related topics 5 Other sources What is market dominance? Market dominance is a measure of the strength of a brand, product, service, or firm, relative to competitive offerings. There is often a geographic element to the competitive landscape. In defining market dominance, you must see to what extent a product , brand, or firm controls a product category in a given geographic area. There are several ways of calculating market dominance. The most direct is market share. This is the percentage of.
Medicare (United States) - is expected to reach 77 million by 2031, when the Baby Boom generation is fully enrolled. It is administered by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) (formerly the Health Care Financing Administration) in the United States Department of Health and Human Services. Medicare uses the Resource-Based Relative Value Scale (RBRVS) to determine how much money each doctor should earn, although it is criticized for not paying doctors enough because of the low conversion factor. Because of the nature of RBRVS, it is possible to pay all doctors more or less depending on how much money the person paying (CMS in this case) is willing to pay. Somewhat limited prescription drug coverage was added in 2003 to take effect in 2006. Table of contents showTocToggle("show","hide") 1 Legislation 2 See also:.
Scale (social sciences) - Scale (social sciences) Scaling is the measurement of a variable in such a way that it can be expressed on a continuum. Rating your preference for a product from 1 to 10 is an example of a scale. With comparative scaling, the items are directly compared with each other (example : Do you prefer Pepsi or Coke?). In noncomparative scaling each item is scaled independently of the others (example : How do you feel about Coke?). Table of contents showTocToggle("show","hide") 1 Composite measures 2 Data types 3 Scale Construction Decisions 4 Comparative Scaling Techniques 5 Non-comparative Scaling Techniques 6 Scale Evaluation 7 See also 8 List of related topics Composite measures Indexes are similar to scales except multiple indicators of a variable are combined into a.
Irish potato famine - lawyer and politician Daniel O'Connell led to the conceding of Catholic Emancipation in 1829, so allowing Catholics to sit in parliament. O'Connell mounted an unsuccessful campaign for the “Repeal” of the Act of Union. Not until 1828-29 did the repeal of the Test Act and the concession of Catholic Emancipation provide political equality for most purpose, including free trade between the British Isles that Irish merchandise would be admitted to British colonies on the same terms as British merchandise. The impact of laissez-faire economics Political equality and laissez-faire were mixed blessings though. These advantages were not enough to offset the full impact of Britain's Industrial Revolution. The time of the Potato Famine coincided with the era of Pax Britannica between the Congress of Vienna (after the defeat of Napoleon) and the.
History of Brazil (1930-1964) - 22.5 to 8 cents a pound amid great stockpiling. As world trade contracted, the coffee exporters suffered a vast drop in foreign exchange earnings. The collapse of Brazil's valorization program, a safety net in times of depression, as it was following the Great War, is another factor linked to the collapse of the coffee oligarchy. The coffee planters had grown precariously reliant on government valorization. Plunging world coffee demand was simply insurmountable; the Brazilian government simply could no longer afford to bail out the coffee planters. By the end of 1930, the country's gold reserves had disappeared , pushing the exchange rate down to a new low. Foreign credit evaporated, as Washington Luís' valorization program for warehoused coffee collapsed altogether. The government was left in a deepening balance-of-payments crisis and the.
Economy of Russia - initially a broadly popular program. Since structural adjustment or shock therapy—cutting subsidies to money-losing farms and industries, decontrolling prices, and moving toward convertibility of the ruble—led to a period of hyperinflation that eroded the purchasing power of fixed-income wages and wiped out the savings of ordinary Russians accumulated during the Soviet years (as a result of monetary overhang), these reforms were considerably unpopular. Privatization, the transfer of legal title to state enterprises to private owners, however, at least at first, offset the unpopularity of stabilization . However, privatization programs are very politically sensitive, raising many legitimate political debates. Who decide how to set values on state enterprises? Does the state accept cash or for government-provided coupons? Should the state allow the workers or managers of the enterprise to gain control over.
Partitioned Poland (1795-1914) - final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815. In the subsequent peace settlement of the Congress of Vienna, the victorious Austrians and Prussians swept away the Duchy of Warsaw and reconfirmed most of the terms of the final partition of Poland. Although brief, the Napoleonic period occupies an important place in Polish history. Much of the legend and symbolism of modern Polish patriotism derives from this period, including the conviction that Polish independence is a necessary element of a just and legitimate European order. This conviction was simply expressed in a fighting slogan of the time, "for your freedom and ours." Moreover, the appearance of the Duchy of Warsaw so soon after the partitions proved that the seemingly final historical death sentence delivered in 1795 was not necessarily the end of.
Operating system advocacy - of getting up to speed with a new program primary applications - Outlook, Explorer, Office - from same source as OS ensures compatibility support Con complex code (registry, "features") Microsoft's business practices (anticompetitive, privacy-invading) feature limitations high cost chilling corporate monotony primary applications from Microsoft discourage third-party alternatives frequently targeted by malicious crackers, worms and viruses Apple Mac OS X Estimated market share: 5-10% Audience: education (30-50%), arts (graphic design, video/film editing, sound editing), science. Pro productive and intuitive easy to use and learn simplicity reliability underlying BSD-based operating system provides many of the benefits of UNIX or Linux, including command line utilities and the ability to run many UNIX programs Many Unix tools and applications (such as mySQL) are being or have been ported to run under OS X "iApps".
History of modern anatomy - article contains some out of date information. It appears to be based on an unknown source written in c. 1900. The history of modern human anatomy in Great Britain begins with the time at which the dissection of the human body became part of the training of students of medicine, and this is one of the greatest debts, though by no means the best recognized, of the many which medical science owes to the remarkable William Hunter. Before his time the anatomy professors of the most celebrated schools both at home and abroad used one or at most two subjects to illustrate their courses of lectures, and were in the habit of demonstrating the performance of surgical operations not on human bodies but on those of lower animals. Few students dissected.
History of the United States (1918-1945) - credit which contributed to both the boom and subsequent bust. The Coolidge Years The Harding administration was rocked by the Teapot Dome scandal. It looked like the President himself might be shown to be involved in corruption, but Harding died in office on 2 August, 1923. He was succeeded by his Vice President, Calvin Coolidge. Coolidge was a taciturn, personally honest New Englander who generally saw his role as to stay out of the way of the booming economy. He was elected to a full term of his own in the U.S. presidential election, 1924 under the slogan "Keep Cool With Coolidge". Coolidge declined to run again in the 1928 election; the Republican Party nominated engineer and Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, who was elected by a wide margin. Hoover was.
History of the United States (1980-present) - Persian Gulf War 2.7 The election of 1992 2.8 The Clinton years 3 Related Topics The Reagan Revolution Changing demographics and the growth of the Sunbelt The most widely discussed demographic phenomenon of the 1970s was the rise of the "Sunbelt," the Southwest, Southeast, and especially Florida and California (surpassing New York as the nation's most populous state in 1964). By 1980, the population of the Sunbelt had risen to exceed that of the industrial regions of the Northeast and Midwest, which were experiencing not only a relative but in some cases an absolute decline in their numbers. The rise of the Sunbelt continued a trend in the growth of suburbs since the 1950s, due in large measure to ever-increasing mobility brought by the growing popularity of automobiles. In addition, the.
General relativity - to imagine a curved surface sitting in space of a higher dimension, that model is not thought to be true in any meaningful sense for the real universe. Curvature can be measured entirely within a surface, and similarly within a higher-dimensional manifold such as space or spacetime. On earth, if you start at the north pole, walk south for about 10,000 km, turn left by 90 degrees, walk for 10,000 more km, and then do the same again, you will be back where you started. Such a triangle with three right angles is only possible because the surface of the earth is curved. The curvature of spacetime can be evaluated, and indeed given meaning, in essentially the same way. The Creation of Gravity Gravity arises because every free-falling bit of matter.
Earth First - Ecology," a philosophy put forward by Arne Naess, Bill Devall, and George Sessions, which holds that all forms of life on Earth have equal value in and of themselves, without regard for their utility to human beings. Earth First!ers use this philosophy to justify an a ecocentric view of the world in which intrisic values for organisms and ecosystems outweigh their resource values. The motto of Earth First! is "No compromise in defense of Mother Earth!" Action within the Earth First! movement is also informed by anarchist political philosophy. Rotation of the primary media organ among publishers in differing bioregions, an aversion of organized leadership or administrative structure, and the use of rhetoric by so-called members identifying Earth First! as a movement rather than an organization, all of these activities characterize.