This article presents findings from a study involving seven focus groups with aged and disabled Medicare beneficiaries in the Kansas City area regarding their impressions of a pilot version of the Medicare & You 1999 handbook and the Medicare Consumer Assessment of Health Plans Study (CAHPS) survey report. Beneficiaries generally had positive reactions to both booklets and viewed the handbook a...

Social Security Disability Insurance beneficiaries undergo periodic medical reviews to determine if they continue to be eligible for disability benefits. We examine how these reviews affect beneficiary well-being by using administrative data to track the earnings of beneficiaries for up to 5 years after their reviews. We estimate that a sizeable percentage of beneficiaries would work if their b...

Medicare eligibility for Social Security disabled-worker beneficiaries begins after 2 years of cash benefit receipt. Extension of the current coverage is often proposed as a way to encourage beneficiaries to return to work. Little is known, however, about the long-run Medicare costs for the disabled and how costs vary by demographic and health characteristics. This article describes Medicare ut...

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...

The Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act (MMA) provides the largest benefit expansion in Medicare's history while enacting major changes to the program's structure. Offering $410 billion in new drug benefits will certainly help many beneficiaries now struggling with the costs of prescriptions, particularly those with low incomes. It is difficult to determine, however, wh...

In 1975, Social Security beneficiaries were given the option of having their monthly benefit payments sent directly to their banks through an electronic funds transfer system. Since then, beneficiaries have been enrolling in this program in rapidly increasing numbers. At the end of 1976, fewer than 5 million beneficiaries--14 percent of the total--were enrolled in the program. By the end of 198...

Using data from 335,249 Medicare beneficiaries who responded to the 2007 Medicare Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) survey, along with data from 22 cognitive interviews, we investigated the reliability and validity of an instrument designed to assess beneficiaries' experiences with their prescription drug plans. Composite measures derived from the instrument had ac...

BACKGROUND Medical spending on psychiatric hospitalization has been reported to impose a tremendous socio-economic burden on many developed countries with public health insurance programmes. However, there has been no in-depth study of the factors affecting psychiatric inpatient medical expenditures and differentiated these factors across different types of public health insurance programmes. I...

BACKGROUND The Bolsa Família Program was created in Brazil in 2003, by the joint of different social programs aimed at poor or very poor families with focus on income transfer to promote immediate poverty relief, conditionalities and complementary programs. Given the contributions of conditional cash transfer programs to poverty alleviation and their potential effects on nutrition and health, t...