Medicare Prescription Drug Plan Costs and Affordability—2007

Diagnosis-Based Risk Adjustment for Medicare Prescription Drug Plan Payments

The 2003 Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act (MMA) created Medicare Part D, a voluntary prescription drug benefit program. The benefit is a government subsidized prescription drug benefit within Medicare. This article focuses on the development of the prescription drug risk-adjustment model used to adjust payments to reflect the health status of plan enrollees.

The costs of a Medicare prescription drug benefit.

This paper describes a preliminary cost estimate, prepared by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), of President Clinton's 1999 prescription drug benefit proposal. The CBO estimated that the new benefit would increase net Medicare outlays by $136 billion between 2002 and 2009, although these estimates are highly uncertain. Because the proposal included an annual cap on the amount of the benefi...

Search costs and Medicare plan choice.

There is increasing evidence suggesting that Medicare beneficiaries do not make fully informed decisions when choosing among alternative Medicare health plans. To the extent that deciphering the intricacies of alternative plans consumes time and money; the Medicare health plan market is one in which search costs may play an important role. To account for this, we split beneficiaries into two gr...

Medicare beneficiaries' knowledge of Part D prescription drug program benefits and responses to drug costs.

CONTEXT Medicare Part D drug benefits include substantial cost sharing. OBJECTIVE To determine beneficiaries' knowledge of benefits and cost responses. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS Telephone interviews were conducted in 2007 in a stratified random sample of community-dwelling Kaiser Permanente-Northern California Medicare Advantage beneficiaries aged 65 years or older, with a gap in co...

Advocating for a Medicare prescription drug benefit.