In the last two decades, Medicare spending has doubled in real terms despite the fact that the health of Medicare beneficiaries improved over this period. The goals of this paper are to document how trends in spending by age have changed among elderly Medicare beneficiaries in the last decade...

We examine the impact of the expansion of public prescription drug insurance coverage from Medicare Part D on the elderly and find evidence of substantial crowd-out. Using detailed data from the 2002-7 waves of the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), we estimate that the extension of Part D...

This paper constructs a rich model of saving for retired single people. Our framework allows for bequest motives and heterogeneity in medical expenses and life expectancies. We estimate the model using AHEAD data and the method of simulated moments. The data show that out-of-pocket medical...

Features of Part D gave rise to broad concern that the drug benefit would negatively impact prescription utilization among the six million dual eligible beneficiaries, either during the transition from state Medicaid to Part D coverage, or in the long-run. At the same time, Part D contained...

We analyze Medicare Part D's net effect on elderly out-of-pocket (OOP) costs and use of prescription drugs using a dataset containing 1.4 billion prescription records from Wolters Kluwer Health (WKH). These data span the period December 2004-December 2007 and include pharmacy customers whose age...

The introduction of Medicare Part D has generated interest in the cost of providing drug coverage to the elderly. Of paramount importance -- often unaccounted for in budget estimates -- are the salutary effects that increased prescription drug use might have on other Medicare spending. This...

People have heterogenous life expectancies: women live longer than men, rich people live longer than poor people, and healthy people live longer than sick people. People are also subject to heterogenous out-of-pocket medical expense risk. We construct a rich structural model of saving behavior...

There is much debate about whether the Medicare Prescription Drug Bill -- the greatest expansion of Medicare benefits since its creation in 1965 -- will improve the health of elderly Americans, and how much it will cost. We model how insurance affects medical care utilization, and subsequently,...

The highly uneven distribution of Medicare payments among elderly beneficiaries, combined with the predictability of some of the expenditures, poses several challenges to the Medicare program. We present information about the distribution of Medicare expenditures among beneficiaries in specific...

We use data from the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS) to document the medical spending of Americans aged 65 and older. We find that medical expenses more than double between ages 70 and 90 and that they are very concentrated: the top 10% of all spenders are responsible for 52% of...