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The Medicare Part D program provides an outpatient prescription drug benefit to older adults and people with long-term disabilities in Medicare who enroll in private plans, including stand-alone drug plans and Medicare Advantage drug plans. This analysis provides the latest data about Part D enrollment, premiums, and cost sharing in 2021 and trends over time.
This brief analyzes leading federal approaches to address Medicaid prescription drug spending, discusses (where available) a range of cost estimates for each policy, and assesses what drives those estimates or where there is uncertainty in them.
In this Axios column, Drew Altman looks beyond Medicare to what’s at stake for employers and workers in the debate about the government negotiating drug prices.
In response to rising drug costs, some policymakers and presidential candidates, including Republican Donald Trump and Democrats Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, have proposed allowing Medicare to negotiate directly with pharmaceutical companies over the price of prescription drugs, in contrast to the current approach under Medicare Part D drug where private plans do the negotiating.
In this column for The Wall Street Journal's Think Tank, Drew Altman examines the public’s mixed views about prescription drug ads and their impact on prescribing patterns, based on a new survey.
This analysis focuses on out-of-pocket drug costs for Medicare Part D enrollees in 2016 for specialty, brand, and generic drugs. Part D drug plans differ considerably in the drugs they list on their formularies, their use of formulary tiers, and the level and structure of cost sharing applied to those tiers. Plan decisions affect different beneficiaries in different ways, depending on the drugs they use. The financial consequences for Part D plan enrollees can be substantial. In addition to examining costs for common drugs, we also examine profiles of multiple drugs for several hypothetical Part D enrollees.
Some Medicare Part D enrollees can expect to pay thousands of dollars out-of-pocket for a single specialty drug in 2016, even though Part D plans provide substantial protection against catastrophic costs, according to a new analysis from the Kaiser Family Foundation.
The Kaiser Family Foundation Survey of Pennsylvania Residents measures Pennsylvanians’ opinions about a selection of health issues, including which issues they believe state policymakers should prioritize, opinions about prescription painkiller abuse, and experiences accessing and paying for health care. The survey was conducted March 7-15, 2016 among a representative sample of 804 adults ages 18 and over living in Pennsylvania.
A new comprehensive Kaiser Family Foundation report analyzes key trends that have shaped the Medicare Part D marketplace since the program launched nine years ago, providing a detailed assessment of changes in plan availability, enrollment, premiums and cost sharing in both private stand-alone drug plans, and Medicare Advantage drug plans.
In this column for The Wall Street Journal's Think Tank, Drew Altman explores the data behind public concern about prescription drug costs and highlights that the people most in need are the most burdened by the problem.
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