Effects of Prescription Drug Insurance on Hospitalization and Mortality: Evidence from Medicare Part DRobert Kaestner, Cuiping Long, G. Caleb Alexander
NBER Working Paper No. 19948 We examine whether obtaining prescription drug insurance through the Medicare Part D program affected hospital admissions, expenditures associated with those admissions, and mortality. We use a large, geographically diverse sample of Medicare beneficiaries and exploit the natural experiment of Medicare Part D to obtain estimates of the effect of prescription drug insurance on hospitalizations and mortality. Results indicate that obtaining prescription drug insurance through Medicare Part D was associated with an 8% decrease in the number of hospital admissions, a 7% decrease in Medicare expenditures, and a 12% decrease in total resource use. Gaining prescription drug insurance through Medicare Part D was not significantly associated with mortality. The NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health provides summaries of publications like this.
You can sign up to receive the NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health by email. You may purchase this paper on-line in .pdf format from SSRN.com ($5) for electronic delivery.
Acknowledgments and Disclosures Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w19948 Users who downloaded this paper also downloaded these:
|
Contact Us
People
James Poterba, presidentJames Poterba is President of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is also the Mitsui Professor of Economics at M.I.T. |
NBER ResearchersResearchers by NBER ProgramComplete NBER Research Family List |
 |
Other People LinksStaffBoard of Directors |