Prescription Use Behavior Among Medicare Beneficiaries with Capped Prescription Benefits

Prescription use behavior among medicare beneficiaries with capped prescription benefits.

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the strategies Medicare beneficiaries adopt to manage their out-of-pocket prescription costs in a prescription drug plan with maximum (.capped.) benefits and to evaluate differences in the likelihood of participating in any one strategy before and after exhaustion of capped prescription benefits. METHODS Self-administered surveys were mailed to 786 Medicare+Choice member...

Medical cost offsets from prescription drug utilization among Medicare beneficiaries.

This brief commentary extends earlier work on the value of adherence to derive medical cost offset estimates from prescription drug utilization. Among seniors with chronic vascular disease, 1% increases in condition-specific medication use were associated with significant (P  less than  0.001) reductions in gross nonpharmacy medical costs in the amounts of 0.63% for dyslipidemia, 0.77% for cong...

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...

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