National health insurance: Some lessons from the Canadian experience

In the current American debate over national health insurance an examination of the Canadian governmental experience is very instructive. Canada is enough like the United States to make the effects of Canadian health insurance policies rather like a large natural experiment. The Canadian experience—universal government health insurance administered by the ten provinces with some fiscal and policy variations—can be used to predict the impact in the United States of proposed national health insurance plans on the medical care system, and the reaction of mass publics and national policymakers to these effects.The central purpose of the Canadian national health insurance was to reduce and hopefully eliminate financial barriers to medical care. In this it succeeded. But it also produced results which Canadian policymakers never anticipated: essentially unexpected side-effects on cost, quality, organization, and manpower distribution of the particular national health insurance program adopted. It should be cause for concern, the article concludes, that most of the prominent American national health insurance proposals resemble the Canadian program in failing to provide a single level of government with both the means and incentives to curb the inflationary effects of national health insurance. The lesson from Canada is that unless the system has very strong anti-inflationary mechanisms and incentives built into it, national health insurance will feed the fires of medical inflation despite great formal governmental authority to control it.     

Federal Administration of the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 in Oklahoma

SMCRA, which established detailed standards for the surfacemining of coal, attempted to balance the need to increase coalproduction with safeguarding the environment. The act was basedon the principle of cooperative federalism. The states wereoffered both positive and negative inducements to assume importantroles in the design and implementation of regulatory programsconsistent with the SMCRA. Oklahomas Department of Mines (DOM)carried out the provisions of the act so poorly that the federalOffice of Surface Mining (OSM) was compelled to take over SMCRAinspection and enforcement. Other provisions of the act wereadministered by DOM, which found itself in a condition of "cohabitation"with OSM from 1984–1987. During that time, DOM becamea stronger, technologically sophisticated agency; OSM gaineda greater appreciation of the difficulties of implementing astate program; the mining industry became reconciled to reclamationcontemporaneous with mining; and there was an increase in citizenparticipation. The return of primacy to Oklahoma may usher ina new federal relationship in surface mining regulation, withmore power shifting to the states as budget pressures reducefunds and the number of employees in OSM.     

Fatal brown bear (Ursus arctos) attack: case report and literature review

Bear incidents are widely publicized, though serious incidents rarely occur. We describe here a case of human death caused by brown bear (Ursus arctos) feet. The brown bear is the biggest carnivore of Greece, reaching up to 200-300 kg weight.This is the first documented fatality involving a brown bear in Greece in which the victim died as a direct traumatic result of the attack.     

Striation Density for Predicting the Identifiability of Fired Bullets with Automated Inspection Systems*

Abstract: Automated firearms identification systems will correlate a reference bullet with all evidence bullets without a selection procedure to exclude the bullets having insufficient bullet identifying signature. Correlations that include such bullets increase the workload and may affect the correlation accuracy. In this article, a parameter called striation density is proposed for determining and predicting bullet identifiability. After image preprocessing, edge detection and filtering techniques are used to extract the edges of striation marks, the resulting binary image distinctly shows the amount and distribution of striation marks. Then striation density is calculated for determining the quality of images. In the experiment, striation densities for six lands of 48 bullets fired from 12 gun barrels of six manufactures are calculated. Statistical results show strong relation between striation density and identification rate. It can provide firearms identification systems with a quantitative criterion to assess whether there are sufficient striae for reliable bullet identification.     

Acting in Concert or Going It Alone: Game Theory and the Law

Law and Philosophy -