Medicare Beneficiaries

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) will make key changes to improve drug affordability for people who have Medicare.

Enrollment in Medicare Advantage plans has increased rapidly in recent years. The share of eligible Medicare beneficiaries enrolled in MA rose from 25% in 2010 to 47% in 2021 (27.6 million enrollees). Payments to MA plans more than doubled between 2015 and 2021 (from $175 to $361 billion), taking the share of total Medicare Parts A & B spending on MA from 38% to 54%.

Telehealth utilization has changed over time since the steep increase from the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. This report updates prior findings on national trends of telehealth use through an analysis using the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey data from April 2021 through August 2022.

This is the final report of an AHRQ study to address the operational gap between CFIs and EFIs. This project focused on validating an established CFI using linked claims-EHR databases of multiple large health systems. The project provides a systematic approach that health systems can use to examine the quality of the EHR data and prepare it for the application of EFI measures.

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 Report to Congress examines the critical role that insulin plays in the treatment of diabetes, reviews evidence on how insulin affordability affects adherence to insulin treatment and affects downstream health consequences, and describes policy efforts to improve the affordability of insulin.

This report and dataset inventory identifies federally funded data linkages that may facilitate patient-centered outcomes research (PCOR) on economic outcomes for Medicare fee-for-service (FFS) beneficiaries.

This study updates ASPE’s previous analysis of the associations between COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths among Medicare beneficiaries and COVID-19 vaccination rates, with full year data through the end of 2021.

Opioid use was very common among the long-term care (LTC) residents in our sample. Perhaps reflecting their post-acute rehabilitative needs, discharged residents were more likely to have opioid use prior to LTC admission and at the beginning of the LTC stay.

The Improving Post-Acute Care Transformation (IMPACT) Act of 2014 requires a report to Congress on unified payment for Medicare post-acute care (PAC). Medicare PAC providers are skilled nursing facilities, inpatient rehabilitation facilities, long-term care hospitals, and home health agencies. Each PAC provider setting has a separate Medicare fee-for-service prospective payment system.