Introduction P harmaceuticals are an integral part of modern medical treatment, often improving quality of life and reducing the need for hospitalization, yet the traditional Medicare benefits package does not include coverage of outpatient prescription drugs.When Medicare was created in 1965, insurance coverage for prescription drugs was not standard and fewer effective pharmaceutical treatmen...

Most government employees have access to retiree health coverage, which provides them with group health coverage even if they retire before Medicare eligibility. We study the impact of retiree health coverage on the labor supply of public sector workers between the ages of 55 and 64. We find that retiree health coverage raises the probability of stopping full time work by 4.3 percentage points ...

Conducted October 9-27, 2013, the Commonwealth Fund Affordable Care Act Tracking Survey interviewed a nationally representative sample of adults who are potentially eligible for the health reform law's new insurance coverage options, whether private plans or expanded Medicaid. Among the survey's key findings: 60 percent of potentially eligible adults are aware of the new marketplaces as a place...

• The Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) and the Investment Company Institute (ICI) have collaborated to develop the EBRI/ICI 401(k) Accumulation Projection Model. This model examines how 401(k) assets might contribute to retirement income for future retirees based on decisions workers make throughout their careers and finds that the median replacement rate from 401(k) accumulations dep...

Given Medicare’s recent national coverage decision on bariatric surgery, as well as potential coverage expansions for other obesity-related treatments, data on obesity in the Medicare population have great relevance. Using nationally representative data, we estimate that between 1997 and 2002, the prevalence of obesity in the Medicare population increased by 5.6 percentage points, or about 2.7 ...

Introduction: The Current Status of Health Insurance Coverage I ncreasing the number of Americans with health insurance has been a recurrent focus of federal and state policymaking, and recent trends suggest that the issue continues to warrant legislative attention.The number of people without health insurance coverage in the United States increased in 2001, a reversal of two years of falling r...

While most of the Affordable Care Act's (ACA's) coverage-related provisions took effect in January 2014, there is limited information on insurance transitions that occurred in the period before and after these changes became operational. In Insurance Transitions Following the First ACA Open Enrollment Period, the authors examine insurance transitions between September 2013 and November 2014 usi...

A new Commonwealth Fund survey finds that in the wake of the Affordable Care Act's first open enrollment period, significantly fewer working-age adults are uninsured than just before the sign-up period began, and many have used their new coverage to obtain needed care. The uninsured rate for people ages 19 to 64 declined from 20 percent in the July-to-September 2013 period to 15 percent in the ...

Assessing and monitoring rangelands in arid regions are important and essential tasks in order to manage the desired regions. Nowadays, satellite images are used as an approximately economical and fast way to study the vegetation in a variety of scales. This research aims to estimate the coverage percent using the digital data given by ETM+ Landsat satellite. In late May and early Ju...