295 research outputs found
Consumer mobiltity in the Irish health insurance market : determinants, incentives and risk equalisation
No full textTHESIS 11285Consumer choice of, and competition among, insurers is becoming a more common feature of many health insurance systems, internationally. For competition, theoretically, to work as a tool of resource allocation in these markets it is important to consider both the ease of consumer switching and the quality of risk equalisation. Consumers should be able to switch insurers without incurring significant switching costs, of which there can be many. Importantly, where consumers are motivated to switch for reasons of price and quality, insurers will be motivated to compete along these dimensions. Furthermore, absence of (or presence of poor quality) risk equalisation in community rated markets can encourage insurers to risk select profitable (e.g. young and healthy) risks at the expense of unprofitable (e.g. older and sicker) risks. Risk selection can have a number of detrimental competitive effects and the best, and most common, way to mitigate against this behaviour is to organise risk equalisation payments between insurers that reflect consumer risk. This thesis uses the Irish private voluntary health insurance market to explore these issues. While a competitive private health insurance market has been in existence in Ireland for close to 20 years, little is known about the motivations and characteristics of switchers in the market. Furthermore, the evolution of the community rated market, in the absence of, for the most part, any risk equalisation payments resulted in strong incentives for risk selection. This contributed to large risk asymmetry observable between the former state-backed monopoly insurer, the Voluntary Health Insurance Board, and the newer entrants. In 2013, risk equalisation payments commenced, however, no detailed understanding exists in terms of their impact. Moreover, this investigation takes place at a time when serious consideration had been given to expanding the role competitive health insurance financing played in the Irish market. More broadly, empirical analysis of these issues in duplicative voluntary health insurance markets has been very limited to date. Taking the above into consideration, and guided by the construction of a conceptual framework of consumer mobility, this thesis examined, in the context of the Irish health insurance market: consumer-reported motivations for switching, and not switching, insurer -- actual switching behaviour, and -- the performance of the belatedly introduced risk equalisation scheme. These issues were analysed through three quantitative empirical studies each based on three distinct datasets obtained exclusively from the Health Insurance Authority and the Voluntary Health Insurance Board, respectively. A low annual switching rate is reported in the Irish market, estimated at slightly less than four percent. In this regard, a large proportion of consumers appear happy with their health insurer and do not switch for that reason. However, a number of costs to switching were also identified. Most notably, over one in seven consumers cited transaction costs as a reason for not switching while a number of non-rational motivations were also reported. The distribution of switching costs also fell disproportionately on high-risk individuals and this was reflected in lower switching propensities for these groups. When individuals did switch, price was reported as the dominant motivation while quality was considerably less important. Reflecting this, strong price effects were also identified when modelling actual switching behaviour, although price responsiveness decreased with age and prior healthcare utilisation, respectively. Evidence from this thesis also points towards the need to improve risk equalisation design if market asymmetry and selection incentives are to be appropriately addressed. Evidence is also found that the replacement of the current risk equalisation design with one predicated on diagnostic information may be a way to achieve this. Overall, results from this thesis provide much deeper and clearer insights into consumer choice of, and competition between, insurers in the Irish market than has heretofore existed. Particularly, concern over barriers to switching, their distribution in the insured population, and the quality of risk equalisation raise questions over the competitive environment in which the Irish voluntary health insurance market currently operates. A corollary of these empirical findings is that they also question the wisdom, on competitive grounds, of transitioning to a mandatory competing health insurer financing model, a reform that up until very recently was being strongly considered by policymakers
2013 Common Book Convocation: Conor Grennan, author of Little Princes: One Man\u27s Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal.
No full textLittle Princes is the epic story of Conor Grennan’s battle to save the lost children of Nepal and how he found himself in the process. Part Three Cups of Tea, part Into Thin Air, Grennan’s remarkable memoir is at once gripping and inspirational, and it carries us deep into an exotic world that most readers know little about.https://digitalcommons.otterbein.edu/commonbook/1003/thumbnail.jp
“Hey Skinny, Your Ribs Are Showing”: The Fitness Industry of Charles Atlas and Masculinity in Early Twentieth-Century United States
No full textAbout the author
Conor Heffernan is a senior of History and Political Science at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. Conor has a keen interest in health and fitness and American culture in the 20th century. He hopes to further his studies into the history of physical culture in the future
Thank God for Free Time: A Leisure Examen
No full textHow are you using your free time? Do you have enough of it? Too much? Are you mainly using it to veg out? Or are you devoting time to growing closer to God and other people and promoting the common good? These are some of the questions that animate the scholarly work of our latest AMDG podcast guest, Dr. Conor M. Kelly. An assistant professor of theology at Marquette University, Conor is the author of the recent book “The Fullness of Free Time: A Theological Account of Leisure and Recreation in the Moral Life.
Review of Irish Women Poets Rediscovered, by Maria Johnston and Conor Linnie (eds.)
No full textReview of Irish Women Poets Rediscovered, by Maria Johnston and Conor Linnie (eds.) (Cork: Cork University Press, 2021), 192 pp., ISBN: 978-1-78205-479-5, €39 (hardback)
The author of this essay wants to acknowledge her participation in the funded Research Project PID2019-109565RB-I00/AEI: "Illness in the Age of Extinction: Anglophone Narratives of Personal and Planetary Degradation (2000-2020)
Conor O'Callaghan and Robert Gray
No full textOne captures Ireland, the other Australia - a unique and lively gathering as two wondrous poets meet. Conor O'Callaghan was born in Newry in 1968 and is the author of three collections of poetry, The History of Rain, Seatown and Fiction. He has been awarded the Patrick Kavanagh Award and Poetry magazine's Bess Hokin Prize. He is also the author of Red Mist: Roy Keane and the Football Civil War, and lives in Manchester. Winner of all of Australia's top poetry awards, Robert Gray captures an essence of his country in both poetry and memoir: 'No-one has seen this country as sharply, or with as much tenderness, as he has done' - Kevin Hart Recordings of an event held Tuesday 6th October 2009. To download and save this audio file right-click on the 'download' link and use 'save link as'; we suggest changing the filename to something more meaningful at this stage. Just clicking the link will normally play the audio on your computer but may not offer you the facility to save the file
Fortissat Science Alliance podcast: Conor McKinnon and Jade McMorland
No full textConor McKinnon and Jade McMorland were PhD students at the University of Strathclyde working on development of renewable energy. They took part in the Fortissat Science Alliance podcast recordings in July 2021.What is the Fortissat Science Alliance?The Fortissat Science Alliance was a Wellcome Trust & Children In Need "Curiosity" project. This scheme provided informal STEM learning opportunities for young people who attended the community centre Getting Better Together Shotts (GBT Shotts) between 2019 and 2023. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, deliveries had to pivot online so the podcast was founded. These recordings were made via Zoom with warm-up STEM activities sent to every young person in advance, along with a profile page for each researcher, so that they were relaxed and able to ask excellent questions.Link to episode on Spotify.Depending on the broadcast date, podcast deliveries were co-sponsored by Glasgow Science Festival, EXPLORATHON 2021, or EXPLORATHON 2022/23.For the duration of the project, it was supported jointly by Children in Need and the Wellcome Trust. In 2021, EXPLORATHON episodes were supported by the European Commission [grant agreement ID 101036101]. In 2022-23, EXPLORATHON episodes were supported by the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council [grant number EP/X020894/1]. Author contributions to contentConor McKinnon and Jade McMorland were the guests featured on this episode. Rebecca Hay was the youth worker coordinating the young people who conducted the interviews as well as co-editing and broadcasting the recordings. Iain Hamilton co-edited the episodes. Kirsty Ross was the STEM consultant for the project and uploaded completed episodes to Figshare.</p
Reputation: When a News story damages a good name
No full textHave you ever stopped to think about the people involved in a news story you have read, watched or heard? Have you ever wondered how they felt, how they were treated by the journalist(s) covering the story and what happened them after the journalists moved on? In my radio documentary, and supporting thesis document, I set out to meet some people whose good name was tarnished by a news story in which they featured. I find out if journalistic ethics were adhered to or completely removed from the reality of the coverage. I also discover the real and lasting impact of having one's reputation questioned, dissected and ultimately tarnished because it was linked to a negative news story. The documentary also endeavors to explore the concept of reputation and its standing in the legal system whilst a tabloid editor reveals the pressures on paper to produce factually correct content in a very competitive market
Conor O'Callaghan and Robert Gray
No full textOne captures Ireland, the other Australia - a unique and lively gathering as two wondrous poets meet. Conor O'Callaghan was born in Newry in 1968 and is the author of three collections of poetry, The History of Rain, Seatown and Fiction. He has been awarded the Patrick Kavanagh Award and Poetry magazine's Bess Hokin Prize. He is also the author of Red Mist: Roy Keane and the Football Civil War, and lives in Manchester. Winner of all of Australia's top poetry awards, Robert Gray captures an essence of his country in both poetry and memoir: 'No-one has seen this country as sharply, or with as much tenderness, as he has done' - Kevin Hart Recordings of an event held Tuesday 6th October 2009. To download and save this audio file right-click on the 'download' link and use 'save link as'; we suggest changing the filename to something more meaningful at this stage. Just clicking the link will normally play the audio on your computer but may not offer you the facility to save the file
TEXTLINGUSTIC ANALYSIS OF THE SHORT STORY SAND BY CONOR CORDEROY
No full textA text is not a string of sentences or a simple grammatical unity, but rather it is semanticunity. The unity that it has is the unity of meaning in context, a texture that expresses the factthat it relates as a whole to the environment in which it emerged. Text linguistics is an appliedanalysis method based on a theoretical foundation that attempts to reveal the semanticstructures of literary texts by examining them from the surface structure to the deep structure.In the text linguistic analysis of a literary text, title, repetitive words that are keywords,topical sentences, conclusion sentence, inferences from implicit expressions, motifs andthemes are main clues, that is, main surface structure elements, leading to real meaning of thetext. In addition to linguistic context, stylistic features of the writer, non-linguistic context areelements that help identify layers of meaning. In this study, Sand, which is a short storywritten by the British writer Conor Corderoy from an ecocritical perspective, will beexamined in terms of cohesion and coherence, which are basic text linguistic criteria. Thecentral topics of the short story Sand include climate change, personal and familial struggles,and societal responses to environmental challenges. The melting of glaciers and globalwarming, as well as how these events will affect people in the future, are also discussed in thestory. With this analysis, the messages placed by the author in the deep structure will bereached and the action he aims for with his text will be determined.Keywords: Text linguistics, ecocriticism, Sand, Conor Corderoy.</p
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