Dataset Information

The impact of Medicare part D on income-related inequality in pharmaceutical expenditure.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Income-related inequality measures such as the concentration index are often used to describe the unequal distribution of health, health care access, or expenditure in a single measure. This study demonstrates the use of such measures to evaluate the distributional impact of changes in health insurance coverage. We use the example of Medicare Part D in the United States, which increased access to prescription medications for Medicare beneficiaries from 2006.

Methods

Using pooled cross-sectional samples from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey for 1997-2011, we estimated income-related inequality in drug expenditures over time using the concentration and generalised concentration indices. A difference-in-differences analysis investigated the change in inequality in drug expenditures, as measured using the concentration index and generalised concentration index, between the elderly (over 65?years) and near-elderly (54-63?years) pre- and post-implementation of Medicare Part D.

Results

Medicare Part D increased public drug expenditure while out-of-pocket and private spending fell. Public drug expenditures favoured the poor during all study periods, but the degree of pro-poorness declined in the years immediately following the implementation of Part D, with the poor gaining less than the rich in both relative and absolute terms. Part D also appeared to result in a fall in the pro-richness of private insurance drug expenditure in absolute terms but have minimal distributional impact on out-of-pocket expenditure. These effects appeared to be short lived, with a return to the prevailing trends in both concentration and generalised concentration indices several years following the start of Part D.

Conclusions

The implementation of Medicare Part D significantly reduced the degree of pro-poorness in public drug expenditure. The poor gained less of the increased public drug expenditure than the rich in both relative and absolute terms. This study demonstrates how income-related inequality measures can be used to estimate the impact of health system changes on inequalities in health expenditure and provides a guide for future evaluations.

SUBMITTER: Carvalho N

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6469203 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

The impact of Medicare part D on income-related inequality in pharmaceutical expenditure.

Carvalho Natalie N Petrie Dennis D Chen Linkun L Salomon Joshua A JA Clarke Philip P

International journal for equity in health 20190416 1

<h4>Background</h4>Income-related inequality measures such as the concentration index are often used to describe the unequal distribution of health, health care access, or expenditure in a single measure. This study demonstrates the use of such measures to evaluate the distributional impact of changes in health insurance coverage. We use the example of Medicare Part D in the United States, which increased access to prescription medications for Medicare beneficiaries from 2006.<h4>Methods</h4>Usi ...[more]

PMID: 30992000

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Project description:BackgroundAlthough Medicare Part D improved drug benefits for many beneficiaries, its impact on the coverage of Medicare Advantage Part D (MAPD) enrollees depended on their pre-existing benefits and whether they had gap coverage under Part D.ObjectiveTo examine changes in prescription drug utilization and expenditures associated with drug benefit changes resulting from the implementation of Part D.PatientsWe studied 248,773 continuously enrolled MAPD patients in eight states. Patients whose insurance product or Census block could not be identified or who had atypical benefits, low-income subsidies or Medicaid coverage were excluded.Main measuresThe main outcomes were changes in prescription drug days supply and expenditures from 2005 to 2006 and 2005 to 2007.DesignWe linked Census data with 2005-7 MAPD claims, encounter, enrollment, and benefits data and estimated associations of the outcomes with changes in drug benefits, controlling for 2005 comorbidities, demographics, and Census population characteristics.Key resultsMAPD enrollees whose drug benefits became potentially less generous after Part D had the smallest increases in drug utilization and expenditures (e.g., drug expenditures increased by $130 between 2005 and 2006), while those who potentially gained the most from Part D experienced the largest increases ($302). The differences in benefit design changes had a stronger association with drug utilization and outcomes among patients at high risk of gap entry than among the entire sample.ConclusionsAlthough Medicare Part D unambiguously improved drug coverage for many elderly, it led to heterogeneous changes in drug benefits among MAPD enrollees, who already had generic and sometimes branded drug benefits. After 2006, benefits were worse for individuals who had branded drug coverage in 2005 but now had a coverage gap, but benefits may have improved for individuals who acquired branded drug coverage. Commensurate with these differential changes in benefits following Part D, changes in drug utilization and expenditures varied substantially as well.

Project description:BACKGROUND:Several studies have confirmed the existence of a significant positive relationship between income and health. Conventional regression techniques such as Ordinary Least Squares only help identify the effect of the covariates on the mean of the health variable. In this way, important information of the income-health relationship could be overlooked. As an alternative, we apply and compare unconventional regression techniques. METHODS:We adopt a distributional approach because we want to allow the effect of income on health to vary according to people's health status. We start by analysing the income-health relationship using a distributional regression model that falls into the GAMLSS (Generalized Additive Models for Location, Scale and Shape) framework. We assume a gamma distribution to model the health variable and specify the parameters of this distribution as linear functions of a set of explanatory variables. For comparison, we also adopt a quantile regression analysis. Based on predicted health quantiles, we use both a parametric and a non-parametric approach to estimate the lower tail of the health distribution. RESULTS:Our data come from Wave 13 of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey, collected in 2013-2014. According to GAMLSS, we find that the risk of ending up in poor, fair or average health is lower for those who have relatively high incomes ($80,000) than for those who have relatively low incomes ($20,000), for both smokers and non-smokers. In relative terms, the risk-lowering effect of income appears to be the largest for those who are in poor health, again for both smokers and non-smokers. The results obtained on the basis of quantile regression are to a large extent comparable to those obtained by means of GAMLSS regression. CONCLUSIONS:Both distributional regression techniques point in the direction of a non-uniform effect of income on health, and are therefore promising complements to conventional regression techniques as far as the analysis of the income-health relationship is concerned.

Dataset Information

The impact of Medicare part D on income-related inequality in pharmaceutical expenditure.

Background

Methods

Results

Conclusions

Publications

The impact of Medicare part D on income-related inequality in pharmaceutical expenditure.

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