Association of Concurrent Functional Vision and Hearing Impairment With Dementia Among Medicare Beneficiaries

In a recently concluded Medicare demonstration, Community Nursing Organizations (CNOs) received capitated payment to provide a subset of Medicare services through a nursing case management delivery system. Demonstration participation was voluntary, both for CNOs and recruited beneficiaries, raising several challenging issues associated with selection. We investigate provider and beneficiary sel...

In 1998 Medicare amended its procedures for making national coverage decisions for new technologies in an attempt to make the process more transparent and evidence based. We examined the quality of evidence for sixty-nine technologies reviewed by Medicare since then. Determinations by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) have generally been consistent with the strength of eviden...

According to the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), the percentage of family physicians accepting new Medicare patients declined from 84.1% in 2000 to 76.1% in 2003 (Trude & Ginsburg 2002). That decline coincided with projected annual decreases in Medicare physician payment announced in March 2002 and March 2003. The decline in the percentage of family physicians accepting new Medica...

Medicare beneficiaries used prescription drug discount cards, both Medicare and non-Medicare cards, to assist them in paying for the cost of prescription drugs. This article describes the beneficiary's awareness and understanding, sources of information, and experience with drug discount cards a year prior and during the implementation of the Medicare-Approved Prescription Drug Discount Card pr...

This profile of Medicare beneficiaries with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) was developed by applying a casefinding algorithm to virtually all Medicare claims from 1991-93. The algorithm identified more than 37,000 beneficiaries with AIDS, approximately 21,000 of whom were living at the end of 1993. These estimates suggest that as many as 12 percent of people living with AIDS at the e...

BACKGROUND Upon signing the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act (MMA) on December 8, 2003, President Bush set in motion the greatest change in the Medicare program since its inception in 1965. MMA was implemented on January 1, 2006, and established the Medicare prescription drug benefit, also known as Medicare Part D. Community and managed care pharmacists were essent...

The Medicare Act entitles qualified providers to reimbursement for the "reasonable cost" of furnishing hospital services to Medicare beneficiaries. The Sixth Circuit's decision in Guernsey Memorial Hospital demonstrates the tension between generally accepted accounting principles and Medicare reimbursement principles.