The Costs of A Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit

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...

Advocating for a Medicare prescription drug benefit.

Estimating the Cost of a Medicare Outpatient Prescription Drug Benefit

People enrolled in Medicare account for more than one-third of all outpatient prescription drug expenditures in the United States. That being the case, a proposed prescription drug benefit under the Medicare program would insure a substantial part of the market and would create the largest expansion of the program in the past 20 years. This article explains how the cost of a drug benefit was es...

A drug benefit: the necessary prescription for Medicare.

Issues in Designing a Prescription Drug Benefit for Medicare