Variation in Estimated Medicare Prescription Drug Plan Costs and Affordability for Beneficiaries Living in Different States

Providing Prescription Drug Coverage for Medicare Beneficiaries

Prescription-drug coverage for medicare beneficiaries.

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...

Prescription Drug Coverage and Spending for Medicare Beneficiaries

Outpatient prescription drug coverage is not a Medicare covered benefit. Debate continues in Congress and elsewhere on modernizing the Medicare benefit package, including proposals that would help the Nation's seniors pay for prescription drugs. Very little is known about which persons within the Medicare population have drug coverage from other sources. Using 1995 data from the Medicare Curren...

Prescription drug costs for Medicare beneficiaries: coverage and health status matter.

A recent National Economic Council report argues that only one-quarter of beneficiaries have any “meaningful” prescription coverage and that the number is declining each year. Others claim, however, that two-thirds of beneficiaries have some form of drug benefit and that coverage rates are rising. Which is right? In fact, both figures are somewhat misleading.This issue brief examines the reason...