Research Library

It may pay to shop around for health care. New legislation requiring transparency in health insurance coverage allows price comparisons between hospitals, across hospital systems, and with different insurers. In a new issue brief, Vivian Ho and co-author Evelyn Li compare quality and analyze pricing data from Houston area hospitals.

Expert Heidi Russell analyzes the economic impacts of relaxing vaccination requirements for children and finds that as immunization rates decline, the costs of an outbreak increase.

A comparison of the prices at three major Houston hospitals — Houston Methodist, St. Luke’s Health and Memorial Hermann — associated with Blue Cross Blue Shield and UnitedHealthcare PPO health plans finds wide-ranging costs for services.

Given the current dearth of women exercising Islamic authority, it may be assumed that for most of Islamic history, questions of religion and religious law were the near-exclusive domain of men. This brief discusses the various roles and contributions of women in Islam and religious scholarship and outlines recommendations for improving attitudes towards women in religious leadership in Muslim countries. This is one of 10 briefs in a series on pluralism and inclusion in the Middle East after the Arab Spring. The project is generously supported by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

GCC states have taken an active role in supporting entrepreneurship creation, as part of efforts to diversify and grow their economies. Yet while state-led entrepreneurship policies have worked to achieve many positive outcomes, they have also revealed some major shortcomings, such as reinforcing the political status quo and limiting the possibility of genuine change toward democratization. M. Evren Tok explores these issues in both a short issue brief and longer research paper on pluralism and inclusion in the Middle East after the Arab Spring. The project is generously supported by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Rising health care costs and generational attitudes toward convenience and the ability to personalize life choices are driving a trend toward greater individual responsibility over the use of health care services.

A study comparing the community benefit expenditures of two sets of Houston hospitals leads the authors to propose strategies that can better justify the tax exemptions the institutions enjoy.

Almost two-thirds of Texans ages 18 to 64 stayed insured with health care coverage during the past 12 months, according to a new report by Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy and the Episcopal Health Foundation.

The percentage of young adults ages 18 to 34 in Texas without health insurance has dropped by 35 percent since the Affordable Care Act (ACA) went into effect.

The percentage of Hispanics in Texas without health insurance has dropped by 30 percent since the Affordable Care Act (ACA) went into effect, but almost one-third of Hispanic Texans ages 18 to 64 remain uninsured.