The creators of the Medicare Advantage (MA) program envisioned that seniors would opt out of fee-for-service Medicare to take advantage of the lower premiums, lower cost-sharing, and additional benefits available in private plans. Earlier research, however, indicates that out-of-pocket costs for MA enrollees vary widely by health status and plan benefit package. This issue brief examines out-of...

We compare healthcare spending in public and private Medicare using newly available claims data from Medicare Advantage (MA) insurers. MA insurer revenues are 30 percent higher than their healthcare spending. Healthcare spending is 25 percent lower for MA enrollees than for enrollees in traditional Medicare (TM) in the same county with the same risk score. Spending differences between MA and TM...

UNLABELLED Enrollment in Medicare Advantage (MA) plans has more than tripled since the inception of the MA program at the beginning of 2006. However, rural enrollment remains well below urban enrollment as a percentage of the eligible population. This policy brief provides findings about enrollment in the newly designed MA program in rural and urban areas across the United States and updates ea...

OBJECTIVE To assess relationships between changes in Medicare Advantage (MA) payment rates and Medicare beneficiary hospitalizations and to simulate the effects of scheduled payment cuts on ambulatory care sensitive (ACS) and elective hospitalization rates. DATA State Inpatient Database discharge abstracts from Arizona, Florida, and New York merged with administrative Medicare enrollment and ...

We compared racial disparities in thirty-day readmissions between traditional Medicare and Medicare Advantage beneficiaries who underwent one of six major surgeries in New York State in 2013. We found that Medicare Advantage was associated with greater racial disparity, compared to traditional Medicare. After controlling for patient, hospital, and geographic characteristics in a propensity scor...

Bidding has been proposed to replace or complement the administered prices that Medicare pays to hospitals and health plans. In 2006, the Medicare Advantage program implemented a competitive bidding system to determine plan payments. In perfectly competitive models, plans bid their costs and thus bids are insensitive to the benchmark. Under many other models of competition, bids respond to chan...

OBJECTIVES To compute a benchmark for tracking readmission rates among patients enrolled in Medicare's private comprehensive Medicare Advantage (MA) plans and to develop preliminary comparisons with the fee-for-service (FFS) readmission rates. STUDY DESIGN Descriptive data presentation with analytic discussion. METHODS We computed a benchmark for rehospitalization rates among MA patients us...

concrete is one of the most utilized construction materials in the world. nowadays, nano silicate usage due to its special property attracted considerable attention. on this basis, studying its environmental functions is an essential issue. accordingly, the behavior of normal concrete and the one with nano silicate were compared via taking advantage of life cycle assessment (lca) method in this...

This paper hypothesizes that Chilean firms had a competitive advantage in operating businesses in other Latin American countries because of their knowledge of business strategy during economic reform. This hypothesis is explained through case studies of Provida, a Chilean pension fund, and Endesa, a Chilean electricity generator, and then tested empirically using data on foreign affiliates of C...