Prescription Drug Coverage and Effects on Drug Expenditures among Elderly Medicare Beneficiaries

Prescription drug coverage, utilization, and spending among Medicare beneficiaries.

Outpatient prescription drugs are not a covered benefit under Medicare. There have been proposals in the past to expand Medicare benefits to include drug coverage, and current discussions dealing with "modernizing" the Medicare benefit package have raised the issue again. Using data from the 1995 Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS), we describe the sources and extent of drug coverage amo...

Providing Prescription Drug Coverage for Medicare Beneficiaries

Prescription-drug coverage for medicare beneficiaries.

MCBS Highlights: Prescription Drug Coverage Among Medicare Beneficiaries

The Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS) is a longitudinal survey of a nationally-representative sample of Medicare enrollees. The survey collects information on a variety of topics, including beneficiaries' health status; health care use and financing; and social, economic, and demographic characteristics. Medicare administrative data is regularly coupled with the information collected t...

Estimating the effects of prescription drug coverage for Medicare beneficiaries.

OBJECTIVE To identify the effect of insurance coverage on prescription utilization by Medicare beneficiaries. DATA SOURCES/STUDY SETTING Secondary data from the 1999 Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS) Cost and Use files, a nationally representative survey of Medicare enrollees. STUDY DESIGN The paper uses a cross-sectional design with (1) a standard regression framework to estimate ...