Although elderly Medicare beneficiaries account for more than a third of the nation's pharmaceutical expenditures, the Medicare program currently offers no prescription drug coverage. While the federal government considers various ways to make prescription drugs more affordable for this population, a number of states, including California, have passed laws creating...
When you are the beneficiary of a retirement plan, specific IRS rules regulate the minimum withdrawals you must take. If you want to simply take your inherited money right now and pay taxes, you can. But if you want to defer taxes as long as possible, there are certain distribution...
Pharmacists and potential plan sponsors finally got the ground rules on how they can market Prescription Drug Plans PDPs to Medicare beneficiaries, who can begin enrolling in Part D. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services issued the guidelines to set standards that plan sponsors must follow. The goal is...
This study projects how much Medicare beneficiaries who sign up for the standard Part D drug benefit in 2006 will pay in quarterly out-of-pocket payments through 2008. It initially estimates that about 38 percent of enrollees will hit the benefit's no-coverage zone, known as the "doughnut hole," and that 14...
Medicare's role in the distribution of mobility-related assistive technology has not been well documented, yet rapid growth and regional variation in spending, and concerns over "in-the-home" coverage criteria, highlight the need for facts. Based on the 2001 Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey, the paper finds that 6.2 percent of beneficiaries obtained...
States have broad latitude in designing their Medicaid programs; this has important implications for access to care. To understand the consequences of state variation, the paper evaluates, for the nation and for thirteen study states, how well the program is providing access for beneficiaries, using the level of access available...
Prescription drug spending has been the fastest growing segment of national health expenditures. As the federal government assumes greater financial responsibility for prescription drug expenditures with the introduction of Medicare part D, federal policymakers are increasingly concerned about prescription drug prices. The report examines the change in retail prices and...
This paper tested the hypothesis that employees are willing to maintain their motivation when their work is relationally designed to provide opportunities for respectful contact with the beneficiaries of their efforts. In Experiment 1, a longitudinal Weld experiment in a fundraising organization, callers in an intervention group briefly interacted with...
Many employees only think about beneficiary designations when they first enroll in a pension or benefits plan. Failure to update beneficiary designations may lead to unplanned results, such as benefits not being paid directly to a surviving dependent or benefits being paid to an unintended person. Beneficiary designations should be...
Beginning in 2006, as a result of the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003, Medicare will offer prescription drug coverage to beneficiaries who choose to enroll in the Part D benefit. In this paper, the potential impact of this benefit overall - and with respect to specific...
This paper was commissioned for the purpose of providing objective and relatively comprehensive information about the potential impact of the Medicare prescription drug benefit on beneficiaries. The paper aims to accomplish this by describing the key provisions of the legislation, presenting up-to-date information about characteristics of the Medicare population, analyzing...
The paper reports about a survey of a random sample of 1,500 elderly people with chronic diseases, who were enrolled in eight Medicare Choice plans. The plan consisted of zero-premium, $200-$300 annual drug benefit and no deductible. The findings indicated that an estimated 32 percent did not fill a prescription...
The report, prepared for the Alliance to Improve Medicare, discusses the impact of special subsidies for beneficiaries with incomes below 150 percent of the federal poverty level, or approximately $13,965 in annual income for 2004. More than 40 percent of the new federal drug coverage under the MMA will go...
On December 8, 2003, the President signed the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003 MMA, which added a prescription drug benefit as part of the Medicare program. The Alliance to Improve Medicare retained PricewaterhouseCoopers PwC to examine the impact of the prescription drug benefit of the MMA...
This article reports on the progress that has been made and questions that have been raised about the new Medicare prescription drug benefit that became law in late 2003. The focus is on issues raised during the National Medicare Prescription Drug Congress held in Washington, DC, in February 2004. The...
Many are concerned that growth of state Medicaid and State Children's Health Insurance Program SCHIP spending, along with limited political clout among beneficiaries, make these programs extremely vulnerable in periods of serious state budget constraints. But observations based on Community Tracking Study site visits show that states have thus far...
This report examines the characteristics of rural beneficiaries of Medicare policies served by urban agencies as compared with those served by rural agencies. The report's findings demonstrate that urban agencies - either directly or through their branch offices - play an important role in providing home health care to rural...
This paper addresses the question of whether managers of trust lands are meeting their fiduciary responsibilities of "maximum economic benefit" for their beneficiaries. Realized market value based economic returns from grazing lease revenues and capital appreciation for all 23 counties in Wyoming are compared with returns that may have been...
On Apr 17, 2002, the IRS issued final regulations on Required Minimum Distributions RMD. One of the provisions made changes to the way in which distributions for multiple beneficiaries are calculated after the death of the retirement-account owner. If the beneficiaries take certain actions by Sept 30 of the year...
