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Objective: To investigate whether expanded access to Veterans Affairs (VA)purchased care increased overall utilization or induced a shift from other payers to VA for emergency care among VA enrollees. Data Sources and Study Setting: This study included all emergency department (ED) encounters in 2019 from hospitals in the state of New York. Study Design: We conducted a difference-in-differences analysis comparing VA enrollees to the general population before and after the implementation of the Maintaining Internal Systems and Strengthening Integrated Outside Networks (MISSION) Act in June 2019. Data Collection/Extraction Methods: We included all ED visits with individuals aged 30 or older at the time of the encounter. Individuals were considered eligible for the policy change if they were enrolled with VA at the beginning of 2019. Principal Findings: Of the 5,577,199 ED visits in the sample, 4.9% (n = 253,799) were made by VA enrollees. Of these, 44.9% of visits were paid by Medicare, 32.8% occurred in VA facilities, and 7% were paid by private health insurance. There was a 6.4% (2.91 percentage points; std. error = 0.18; p < 0.01) decrease in the proportion of ED visits paid by Medicare among VA enrollees relative to the general population after the implementation of the MISSION Act in June 2019. This decrease was larger for ED visits with a subsequent inpatient admission (-8.4%; 4.87 percentage points; std. error = 0.33; p < 0.01). There was no statistically significant change in the total volume of ED visits (0.06%; std. error = 0.08; p = 0.45). Conclusions: Leveraging a novel dataset, we demonstrate that MISSION Act implementation coincided with a shift in the financing of non-VA ED visits from Medicare to VA without any increase in overall ED utilization. These findings have important implications for VA health care financing and delivery. KEYWORDS emergency care, insurance, medicare, veterans health, veterans health services, 1 | INTRODUCTION The US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has long partnered with the non-VA health care community to provide certain outpatient, inpatient and emergency care services to VA [...]

Robotics and automation have become vital to the success of global manufacturing. According to a 2014 report from Allied Market Research, the global industrial robotics market (valued at $26.78 billion [...]

PETER MCILROY, AN IMMIGRANT from Scotland, founded Robroy Industries in 1905 under the name of Enameled Metals Co. "It's one of those All-American stories," says Robroy Industries' CEO Peter McIlroy. […]

Byline: Aaron Dalton Early next year, 2,000 Hearst Corp. employees will move to the cutting edge. At the company's new West 57th Street headquarters, they will walk on carpets and [...]

Our cultural vocabulary indicates that marriages move one way--downhill. The "honeymoon period" implies post-honeymoon strife; the "seven-year itch" suggests that we tire of our mate at year seven. Now, Wright [...]

You can't teach a middle-aged dog new tricks--at least, that's the conclusion of a new study suggesting that our attitudes may be most stubborn in our prime of life, rather [...]

Ask your romantic partner, "Do you love me more than yesterday?" and a positive answer just might keep your relationship going--if you believe him. A study conducted by Susan Sprecher, [...]

The European settlers and fortune-seekers who made their way West along the Oregon Trail in the mid-19th century faced a difficult choice when they arrived at the steep valley known [...]

Details of the various attractions of Aruba including the annual Aruba Music Festival that appeal to tourists throughout the year are presented.

In our April cover story," 25 Things You Can Do to Save Lives Now," Hospitals & Health Networks highlighted some relatively simple and low-cost strategies hospitals and their medical staffs [...]

MILE HIGH DANCING 'Fifty-plus years in business gets you a pretty good Rolodex!' laughs Gwen Bowen of Bowen's School of Dance Arts, explaining how she persuaded the Denver Public Schools [...]

FIVE YEARS AGO, WHEN Maggine Fuentes joined Core Systems as HR manager, she knew she would have to make injury reduction her top priority. Accidents at the 500-plus-employee plastic injection […]

Medical City, a 598-bed tertiary care center in Dallas, used to employ the traditional cook-chill system of food service. Food was largely cooked in advance, blast chilled, placed on trays [...]

In the dog-eat-dog world of staff recruiting, four hospitals in the Columbus, Ohio, area have decided to muzzle their competitive nature. With financial and organizational help from the Osteopathic Heritage [...]

In 2000, Mount Carmel Health Systems was struggling with a human resources crisis. Workers were unhappy and leaving their jobs. Overall staff turnover at the central Ohio health system was [...]

Made of steel, plastic or aluminum, truck tool boxes sit behind a pick-up-truck's cab and reach from one side of the truck bed to the other. Newer versions feature structural [...]

Allan Hanna, president of Auditron, Inc., a general contractor based in Spokane, WA, recently completed a three-level, 2,100-sq-ft house using interlocking concrete form blocks made from expanded polystyrene (EPS). The [...]

U.S. businesses, including retailers large and small, may soon be seeing a lot less of OSHA inspectors. Together, federal OSHA and the staterun safety and health programs it oversees, inspect [...]

The recent top-selling book, 'The Da Vinci Code,' by Dan Brown, concerns a secret that the medieval Knights Templar were supposed to have discovered beneath the Temple of Solomon in [...]

* JORDAN HAYNES * BURLINGTON, WIS. * YEARS ON JOB: 6 WRECKING A RIDE is harder than it looks. 'It's not just hitting a button,' says Jordan Haynes, a 24-year-old [...]

ARON OAKLEY breaks 100 mph in his Ford Focus Midget racer, but the 28-year-old is used to higher speeds at his day job. As the aerodynamics engineer for Penske Racing's [...]

IF IT WEREN'T FOR THE FISHING, Tim Mossberg might never have come to Fort Walton Beach, Fla. Mossberg owns TLM Industries, which produces embroidered uniforms for convenience store chains. "The […]

On Dec. 10, the Nobel Foundation will hand out prizes worth nearly $1.3 million each to this year's laureates. Not invited to the ceremony? Console yourself with a visit to [...]

Work concludes this month on installing 7244 solar panels on three sides of the CIS service tower in not-so-sunny Manchester, England, making it the largest vertical solar array in [...]

December marks the 30th anniversary of the Metric Conversion Act, which encouraged voluntary conversion to the metric system. Most Americans didn't budge from English units (feet, pounds, etc.). Snicker all [...]

The first ever World Final of Formula BMW roars across the starting line in Bahrain on Dec. 13. Drivers as young as 15 will hit 140 mph on the Bahrain [...]

New in stores: a robot monkey with an evil streak. Designed by a Hollywood prosthetics engineer, the WowWee Alive Chimp is a life-size, screeching animatronic monkey bust [pictured above, with [...]

For students at Newport-Mesa Unified School District, flexibility is the way of the future. In a drive to give to its students what it calls '21st century skills,' the district [...]

The Nov. 4 release of the first digital 3D feature, Disney's Chicken Little, wit[ be a cinematic milestone--and for more than just the cuddly CGI birds. Special projectors will display [...]

Major construction begins on the 85-story Federation complex in Moscow this month. By 2007 it will top 1100 ft., dwarfing Europe's reigning giant, the 850-ft. Commerzbank in [...]

Pop some bubbly and toast the heavens: Nov. 2 is the fifth anniversary of the manning of the International Space Station (ISS). The modular structure now measures 15,000 cu. ft-in [...]

Drivers may not pay much attention to the new 1-25 highway bridge at New Mexico's Dona Ana Interchange when it opens this month, but scientists from New Mexico State University [...]

American millionaire Gregory Olsen blasts off aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket this month to become the third tourist in space. Like Dennis Tito and Mark Shuttleworth before him, Olsen paid [...]

Will Klingons sing duets with Jedi knights? We'll find out when fans of both series visit Space Camp in Huntsville, Ala., from the 26th to the 31st for the first-ever [...]

Honoring scientists who make people laugh and think, the 15th First Annual 1g Nobel Prize ceremony will be held on the 6th at Harvard University. Last year, prizes were awarded [...]

More than 400 people will leap from the second longest steel-arch bridge in the world on Bridge Day (Oct. 15) in Fayetteville, W.Va. The event, held annually since 1980, is [...]

On Oct. 15, Ironman World Championship cyclists must keep a minimum three-bike-length distance from each other during the 112-mile cycling portion of the Hawaiian triathlon. Researchers from race sponsor Ford [...]

Problem: Bradley K. Barrett, superintendent of the Gilbert (Ariz.) Public Schools, knew two things when he looked at how his district's students met the state standards. He knew he wanted [...]

The State Department is scheduled to begin distributing electronic passports that use RFID technology. The new transmitting capability concerns privacy advocates, but the government is working to provide protection by [...]

From the 9th to the 14th, nature puts on its best light show. The Perseid meteor shower occurs when Earth runs through the dusty debris left by comet Swift-Tuttle (below). [...]