BACKGROUND Patients with coronary heart disease are recommended to use statins following hospital discharge. Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) is a common complication of hospitalization, but the use of statins following discharge among patients who were not initially hospitalized for AMI has not been assessed adequately. METHODS AND RESULTS Using the Medicare 5% national random sample, we de...

IMPORTANCE In a period of dynamic change in health care technology, delivery, and behaviors, tracking trends in health and health care can provide a perspective on what is being achieved. OBJECTIVE To comprehensively describe national trends in mortality, hospitalizations, and expenditures in the Medicare fee-for-service population between 1999 and 2013. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS Se...

Social dilemmas, where mutual cooperation can lead to high payoffs but participants face incentives to cheat, are ubiquitous in multi-agent interaction. We wish to construct agents that cooperate with pure cooperators, avoid exploitation by pure defectors, and incentivize cooperation from the rest. However, often the actions taken by a partner are (partially) unobserved or the consequences of i...

This article is the last in a series of studies concerning Medicare program costs of Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) beneficiaries who were under age 62 at time of entitlement to disabled-worker benefits. The earlier work provided the statistical analysis and mathematical models needed to construct estimates of Medicare costs for those beneficiaries while in the DI program. In this ar...

BACKGROUND The prevalence, health care expenditures, and hospitalization experiences are important considerations among elderly populations with multiple chronic conditions. METHODS A cross-sectional analysis was conducted on a nationally random sample of 1 217 103 Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries aged 65 and older living in the United States and enrolled in both Medicare Part A and Med...

PURPOSE We assess the effect of consumer-directed care on the emotional, physical, and financial well-being of the primary informal caregivers of the Medicaid beneficiaries who voluntarily joined Arkansas's Cash and Counseling demonstration. DESIGN AND METHODS The demonstration randomly assigned beneficiaries to a program in which they could direct their own disability-related supportive serv...

ISSUE: Fifty-six million people--17 percent of the U.S. population--rely on Medicare. Yet, its benefits exclude dental, vision, hearing, and long-term services, and it contains no ceiling on out-of-pocket costs for covered services, exposing beneficiaries to high costs. GOAL: To inform discussion of possible changes to Medicare, this issue brief looks at beneficiaries’ out-of-pocket costs by in...

There are numerous types of benefits paid under the Social Security programs of the United States, with each type of benefit having its own set of eligibility rules and benefit formula. It is likely that there is an association between the type of benefit a person receives and the economic circumstances of the beneficiary. This article explores that association using records from the Current Po...

In 1982, disabled workers who came on the social security disability insurance rolls from mid-1980 to mid-1981 had median monthly incomes of less than $500 if they were unmarried and less than $1,300 if they were married. These median monthly income levels, which include the income of a spouse and minor children if present, are roughly half those of the noninstitutionalized population aged 25-6...