TY  - JOUR
AU  - Bhattacharya,Jay
AU  - Lakdawalla,Darius
TI  - Does Medicare Benefit the Poor? New Answers to an Old Question
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 9280
PY  - 2002
Y2  - October 2002
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w9280
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w9280.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Jay Bhattacharya
117 Encina Commons
Center for Primary Care
and Outcomes Research
Stanford University
Stanford, CA  94305-6019
Tel: 650/736-0404
Fax: 650/723-1919
E-Mail: jay@stanford.edu

Darius N. Lakdawalla
Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics
University of Southern California
3335 S. Figueroa St, Unit A
Los Angeles, CA 90089-7273


Los Angeles, CA 90
Tel: 213/740-6012
E-Mail: dlakdawa@healthpolicy.usc.edu
AB  - Previous research has found that Medicare benefits flow primarily to the most economically advantaged groups and that the financial returns to Medicare are consequently higher for the rich than for the poor. Taking a different approach, we find very different results.  According to the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey, the poorest groups receive the most benefits at any given age. In fact, the advantage of the poor in benefit receipt is so great that it easily overcomes their higher death rates. This leads to the result that the financial returns to Medicare are actually much higher for poorer groups in the population and that Medicare is a highly progressive public program. These new results appear to owe themselves to our measurement of socioeconomic status at the individual level, in contrast to the aggregated measures used by previous research.
ER  -