Effective January 1, 2023, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) eliminated enrollee cost-sharing for recommended vaccines covered under Medicare Part D. In 2021, 3.4 million people received vaccines under Part D, and annual out-of-pocket costs were $234 million. This translates to nearly $70 in out-of-pocket spending per Medicare enrollee receiving a Part D vaccine that they would not have had to pay if the IRA had been in effect in 2021.
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**ALERT – ASPE is in the process of revising the race and ethnicity data in the Issue Brief. We caution users to wait for the revised data on race and ethnicity to be posted to the website. Note that the Issue Brief currently uses race and ethnicity information that CMS obtains from the Social Security Administration (SSA). This information has been shown to substantially undercount the number of Hispanic and Asian American/Pacific Islander beneficiaries. To address this undercount, CMS has developed the Research Triangle Institute (RTI) race and ethnicity recoding algorithm, commonly known as “RTI race.”
ASPE is in the process of revising the current results using the RTI race measure.
For further reading on race and ethnicity information in Medicare data, see: Filice, Clara E. MD, MPH, MHS; Joynt, Karen E. MD, MPH. Examining Race and Ethnicity Information in Medicare Administrative Data. Medical Care 55(12):p e170-e176, December 2017. DOI: 10.1097/MLR.0000000000000608. https://journals.lww.com/lww-medicalcare/abstract/2017/12000/examining_race_and_ethnicity_information_in.26.aspx