Medicare beneficiaries and drug coverage.

Whether or not to add a prescription drug benefit to the basic Medicare package is at the forefront of congressional debate. Using data from the 1996 Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS), we examine changes in drug insurance coverage levels from 1995 to 1996 and compare drug use and spending data for Medicare beneficiaries with and without drug coverage. The data show the enrollees without drug insurance consistently use fewer prescriptions, spend more out of pocket, and have less in total drug expenditures than their insured peers.

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 Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS), the authors present information on who has coverage by various sociodemographic categories. The data indicate higher-than-average levels of coverage for minority persons, beneficiaries eligible for Medicare because of disability, and those with higher incomes.

Matching MCBS (Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey) and Medicare data: the best of both worlds.

Survey reports from the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS) were matched to Medicare administrative files to create the 1992 MCBS Cost and Use file. This file improves on previous MCBS Access-to-Care user files by representing the entire (ever enrolled) Medicare population and including services not covered by Medicare such as outpatient prescription drugs and long-term facility care. The matching and reconciliation process improved the accuracy and completeness of health care use and cost. For example, Medicare billing data corrected 22 percent of survey reports that did not record Medicare as a payer and 39 percent in which the amount was missing.

Ownership and average premiums for Medicare supplementary insurance policies.

This article describes private supplementary health insurance holdings and average premiums paid by Medicare enrollees. Data were collected as part of the 1992 Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS). Data show the number of persons with insurance and average premiums paid by type of insurance held--individually purchased policies, employer-sponsored policies, or both. Distributions are shown for a variety of demographic, socioeconomic, and health status variables. Primary findings include: Seventy-eight percent of Medicare beneficiaries have private supplementary insurance; 25 percent of those with private insurance hold more than one policy. The average premium paid for private insurance in 1992 was $914.

Why more cost-sharing won't slow Medicare spending.

In considering ways to slow the growth in Medicare expenditures, policymakers have concluded that increasing point-of-service cost-sharing for patients will reduce demand for health services. Under the current system, Medicare beneficiaries faced with increased cost-sharing can reduce their demand for services or purchase additional private insurance. New data from the 1991 Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey show that high-income persons protect themselves from out-of-pocket costs by purchasing private supplemental insurance. Surprisingly, the data also reveal that many low-income persons also purchase private insurance, demonstrating that the elderly--whatever their income level--consider supplementary insurance more of a necessity than a luxury. Thus, it appears that increased beneficiary cost-sharing would have a limited effect on Medicare spending growth.

Health insurance and the elderly.

The effectiveness of proposed changes to the Medicare program depends on consumers' responses to different market incentives, which vary according to the coverage the elderly possess to supplement their Medicare coverage. This Data Watch explores the extent of supplemental insurance among the elderly, based on a new data set from the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey. Only 11 percent of Medicare beneficiaries have only Medicare as their source of coverage; the rest of the elderly population is covered by either private coverage (employer-sponsored retiree coverage or individually purchased coverage) or Medicaid. An increase in Medicare cost sharing would likely affect one-third of elderly beneficiaries, which calls into question the effectiveness of this approach to Medicare program reform.

Health insurance and the elderly: data from MCBS (Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey).

This article shows the supplemental insurance distribution and Medicare spending per capita by insurance status for elderly persons in 1991. The data are from the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS) and Medicare bill records. Persons with Medicare only are a fairly small share of the elderly (11.4 percent). About three-fourths of the Medicare elderly have some form of private insurance. The share with Medicaid is 11.9 percent, which has increased recently as qualified Medicare beneficiaries (QMBs) started to receive partial Medicaid benefits. In general, Medicare per capita spending levels increase as supplemental insurance comes closer to first dollar coverage. When the data were recalculated to control for differences in reported health status between the insurance groups, essentially the same spending differences were observed.

Measuring input prices for physicians: the revised Medicare Economic Index.

Medicare payments for physician services under Part B were historically restrained by capping prevailing charges using the Medicare Economic Index (MEI). The MEI, an input price index for physician services that incorporates an adjustment for economywide labor productivity, has not undergone a major revision since 1975. The MEI is an important determinant of the annual volume performance standard that will be used to set aggregate increases in the revised system for paying physicians under Medicare beginning in 1992. The MEI will also be used in establishing the annual changes to the payment conversion factors under the new payment system.

Measuring hospital input price increases: the rebased hospital market basket.

The input prices indexes used in part to set payment rates for Medicare inpatient hospital services in both prospective payment system (PPS) and PPS-excluded hospitals were rebased from 1982 to 1987 beginning with payments for fiscal year 1991. In this article, the issues and evidence used to determine the composition of the revised hospital input price indexes are discussed. One issue is the need for a separate market basket for PPS-excluded hospitals. Also, the payment implications of using hospital-industry versus economywide measures of wage rates as price proxies for the growth in hospital wage rates are addressed.

Assessing Medicare's prospective payment system for hospitals.

The Medicare prospective payment system for hospitals was created to slow the growth of government spending on health care. This analysis has shown that the program has accomplished its cost-containment objective in the first five years of its existence. The average length of hospital stay has dropped sharply under PPS, reducing hospital costs. These reduced costs combined with payments based on higher pre-PPS historic costs have given hospitals high profits in the early years of PPS. One of the expected but unwanted outcomes, more admissions, has never occurred. The unexpected rop in admissions under PPS has been responsible for government savings on Medicare inpatient care. Although Medicare outpatient hospital and physician expenditures have grown at fast rates during PPS, there is no evidence in aggregate date that they have grown any faster because of inpatient care shifting to avoid PPS payment controls. The Medicare PPS savings have extended to all U.S. hospital spending, which has grown at much slower rates since the implementation of PPS. There have also been negative outcomes from PPS, and some questions posed about PPS remain unanswered. The inflation in "DRG creep" or upcoding that was predicted for PPS did occur. The government has since washed much of this code inflation out of the permanent payment base, but this phenomenon may not be a self-limiting problem, as was widely hoped. To date there is no convincing evidence of poorer quality of care under PPS, but most of the available evidence is based on mortality studies, which have limited use in measuring changes in quality of care. While PPS has helped to slow the growth in Medicare and national hospital spending, it has not had an appreciable effect on the rate of growth in the nation's total health spending. Although it was unintended, PPS has been providing a natural experiment on the issue of whether increased cost sharing dampens demand for health care services. By slowing the growth rate of inpatient hospital spending, PPS has increased the share of Medicare spending under SMI, where beneficiaries have higher coinsurance. The short-run beneficiary response appears to be an increase in demand for Medi-gap health insurance rather than a dampening of demand for services. To this point it appears that Medicare's PPS has been successful in containing the growth in hospital costs while avoiding, or managing, unwanted consequences. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)

Dental visits time interval since last visit, United States - july 1963-june 1964.

Data collected during the period July 1963 and June 1964 indicate that an estimated 78.1 million persons, or 42.0 percent of the civilian, noninstitutional population, made one or more dental visits within the year prior to interview. Approximately 16.6 percent of the population had never seen a dentist. These data are derived from household interviews conducted in a nation-wide sample of the population for the Division of Health Interview Statistics of the National Center for Health Statistics. The proportion of persons with recent dental visits varied markedly with age. Proportionally fewer persons at the extremes of the age range-under 5 years and 65 years and over-had seen a dentist in the past year than had persons in the other age groups. Persons aged 5-24 had the highest percentages. Population groups with the highest proportion of persons receiving dental care within a year were females 5-14 years (55.8 percent) and 15-24 years (58.3 percent). In all age groups a larger proportion of females than of males had visited a dentist within the yeur prior to interview. An estimated 44.6 percent of white persons and 22,7 percent of nonwhite persons made one or more dental visits in the year prior to interview. This large differential was reduced somewhat when white and nonwhite persons with similar incomes were compared.