Evaluation Design: Best Practices for Enrolling Low-Income Beneficiaries into the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit Program.

The new Medicare Part D benefit, which began on January 1, 2006, expanded Medicare to include prescription drugs, and it required beneficiaries to change how they interact with the program. Past experience with low enrollment in a variety of programs designed to aid low-income Medicare beneficiaries suggests that there will be significant barriers to enrolling them into the Low-Income Subsidy (LIS) and Part D plans and getting them to make choices among different plan options. This report presents the evaluation framework, methods of data collection, and analytic strategies for identifying best practices–and the factors that contribute to their effectiveness–for the successful enrollment of all types of low-income Medicare beneficiaries into the LIS and Part D programs.