Seniors

The brief provides a quick explainer of the prescription drug provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act signed into law on August 16, 2022 and presents new estimates on how many Medicare beneficiaries could be helped by those provisions.

The Inflation Reduction Act includes several provisions that will lower prescription drug costs for people with Medicare and reduce drug spending by the federal government. This brief summarizes these provisions and discusses the expected effects on people, program spending, and drug prices and innovation.

This brief provides an overview of Medicare spending and financing, based on the most recent historical and projected data from the Medicare Trustees and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The brief highlights trends in Medicare spending and key drivers of spending growth, including higher enrollment, growth in health care costs, and increases in payments to Medicare Advantage plans.

As winter approaches, a new KFF analysis finds that less than half (45%) of all nursing facility residents and less than a quarter of staff (22%) are up to date with their COVID-19 vaccinations. That is a sharp drop from the 87 percent of nursing facility residents and staff who…

This issue brief analyzes data on the share of nursing facility residents and staff who are up-to-date with their COVID-19 vaccines as of the week ending November 20th, 2022, in the 14,400 nursing facilities that reported data (out of 15,200 total).

In this issue brief, we estimate rates of Medicaid coverage loss among people who became Medicare-Medicaid enrollees (MMEs) during 2018 but did not have any months of MME coverage in the prior year. We compare outcomes for partial-benefit MMEs and full-benefit MMEs.

About 656,000 people across the country were on state waiting lists for home and community-based services financed through Medicaid waivers in 2021, finds a new KFF analysis. But such waiting lists are an incomplete and often inaccurate measure that can both overstate and understate unmet need. The data about waiting…

This data note provides new information about waiting lists from KFF’s most recent survey of state Medicaid HCBS programs, highlighting why waiting lists are an incomplete measure of unmet need and why they are not comparable across states or over time. KFF also recently provided new waiting list indicators on State Health Facts to help people better understand who is on waiting lists and what those waiting lists mean.

This issue brief presents the latest findings on key state policy choices about Medicaid HCBS in 2022 based on the 20th KFF survey of state officials administering Medicaid HCBS programs in all 50 states and DC. The data were collected from April through September 2022. The survey was sent to each state official responsible for overseeing the administration of HCBS benefits (e.g., home health, personal care, and services for specific populations such as people with physical disabilities), but some states submitted responses for the state overall.