Duke 2008 | ASHE | Equity and Efficiency in Health and Healthcare

Description: The Medicare Part D Prescription Drug Benefit extends drug coverage to over 45 million Medicare beneficiaries, and represents the largest addition to Medicare. Yet little empirical work has studied the impact of the Medicare Part D Prescription Drug Benefit on drug utilization and expenditures.

We propose an organized session at ASHE to feature three studies that examine the impact Medicare Part D. The intention of the session is first to present study of average impact of Part D on utilization and expenditures; and then to present work that studies the impact of the policy on other important clinical and economic margins (e.g. generic vs. branded drug use, impact by drug class). The third paper focuses less on impact and more on differential uptake of Part D plans. This paper provides a starting point for discussing of welfare impacts of Part D once selection effects are considered. All three papers exploit detailed retail pharmacy claims data that represents over 15% of the pharmacy drug market, thereby providing empirical study representing a substantial fraction of the entire beneficiary population. By choosing these three papers, this session can serve as a medium for discussing and disseminating some of the earliest and most rigorous empirical studies of Part D. The abstract of each paper follows.