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The federal/state Medicaid program is designed to provide health insurance for the nation's poorest, yet between 15 and 20 percent of the population continue to have no health insurance. Classic utility-based insurance theory is examined to see if it well explains why some do and some do not purchase health insurance at the state level or if a host of other non-economic factors are needed. This pooled, cross-sectional time-series analysis shows that the state characteristics most strongly associated with the prevalence of a lack of health insurance is the percent of persons whose income falls below the poverty line, the percent of the state's population that is female and the percent of the population with only a high school education. This analysis suggests that the starting point for policies aimed at limiting the number of insured should be limiting poverty and perhaps recognizing the gender/education influence in designing state eligibility requirements. Copyright International Atlantic Economic Society 2005I18, I10,

Natural gas local distribution companies (LDCs) face the problem of managing natural gas purchases under conditions of uncertain demand and frequent price change. In this paper, we present a stochastic optimization model to solve this problem. Unlike other models, this model explicitly considers deliverability, the rate at which gas can be added to and withdrawn from a storage facility, as a variable, and considers its role in ensuring a secure supply of gas. Deliverability is often overlooked in gas supply planning, yet is a critical factor in achieving a secure gas supply. Using data from an LDC in Huntsville, Alabama, we show how this model can be used to minimize total cost while meeting constraints regarding the security of gas supply. We also demonstrate that security is dependent on the rate of deliverability, which in turn is affected by a number of factors including gas availability, storage and transportation considerations, and weather conditions.

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