scholarly journals The Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS): Providing Unique Access to Data on the Medicare Population

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 908-908
Author(s):  
Hildie Cohen ◽  
Sarah Hoyt ◽  
Sara Navin ◽  
Jennifer Titus ◽  
Mia Ibrahim

Abstract The Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS) is a continuous, multipurpose survey of a nationally representative sample of the Medicare population, conducted by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). It collects data on demographics, health insurance, health status, health care expenditures, satisfaction with care, and access to care for Medicare beneficiaries. The MCBS provides a unique source of information regarding beneficiaries aged 65 and over and beneficiaries aged 64 and below with disabilities residing in the United States that cannot be obtained solely through CMS administrative sources. For researchers interested in issues of health care utilization and cost, CMS releases two Limited Data Set (LDS) files for each data year and a Public Use File (PUF) freely available for download and use. Also, special topic based PUFs have been released on the impact of COVID-19 on Medicare beneficiaries. This presentation will demonstrate the importance of the MCBS for research on the Medicare population, discuss how researchers can access the data, where researchers can find published MCBS estimates, what content areas have recently been added, such as food insecurity, limited English proficiency, and COVID-19 vaccination uptake and what new content is on the horizon. The presentation will also discuss the operational challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the content enhancement opportunities created by the public health emergency. It will conclude with a review of the suite of materials and documentation available for data users to enhance their research and utilize more timely data.

Author(s):  
Marian A. Aguilar

This entry provides an abbreviated version of the status of women's health in the United States, highlighting health care utilization, health care expenditures, policy issues, barriers to health care, and the impact on populations at risk. The findings accentuate the importance of moving the women's health care agenda forward because of the persistence of health disparities not just among women of color but among women with disabilities, adolescents, women in violent relationships, women with AIDS, women who are incarcerated, women who are homeless, older low-income women, women on welfare, and lesbian women.


Circulation ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 116 (suppl_16) ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert L Page ◽  
Kara B Strongin ◽  
Roger M Mills ◽  
Christopher Hogan ◽  
JoAnn Lindenfeld

Introduction: By 2010, the number of individuals ≥ 65 years with a heart failure (HF) diagnosis should increase by an additional 700,000. As the financial burden of HF is expected to substantially increase, we examined health care expenditures of Medicare beneficiaries with HF to estimate the current healthcare costs and resource allocation. Methods: An analysis of 2005 Medicare claims was conducted, using a 5% sample standard analytic and denominator file, limited data set version to extrapolate the 34,150,200 Medicare beneficiaries. The cohort was defined by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Hierarchical Condition Categories Model which requires one HF diagnosis from a physician or hospital outpatient department/inpatient bill. HMO enrollees, persons without Part A and Part B coverage, and those outside the United States were excluded. Results: Based on inclusion criteria, 260,076 beneficiaries were identified. Beneficiaries with HF accounted for 13% of the total beneficiary population and 37% of all Medicare spending. Reimbursement for hospital inpatient admissions, physician visits, and hospital outpatient visits accounted for $12,556; $5,875; and $2,753 per-capita, respectively. In one year, 22% of all beneficiaries required hospitalization compared to 59% of beneficiaries with HF. Thirty-one percent of beneficiaries with HF had ≥ 2 inpatient admissions. Twenty-four percent of all hospital discharges were for HF, either as a principal diagnosis or co-morbidity, accounting for $30.4 billion. On average, 8.3 different outpatient and inpatient providers ordered services for a single beneficiary. Beneficiaries with at least two prior HF hospitalizations within the index period had on average 3.04 physician visits every three months. Only 26% of these visits were conducted by a cardiologist. Conclusion : Medicare beneficiaries with HF impose a tremendous burden on Medicare, consisting of over one-third of Medicare spending. It will be important to determine how much of this burden is due to HF and how much to comorbid conditions. Development of specialized Medicare HF Management Programs, also providing comprehensive care for co-morbidities, could curtail these admissions and potentially reduce costs.


2010 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. A7
Author(s):  
FX Liu ◽  
GC Alexander ◽  
SY Crawford ◽  
AS Pickard ◽  
DR Hedeker ◽  
...  

Medicine ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 98 (12) ◽  
pp. e14871 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kiran Raj Pandey ◽  
Fan Yang ◽  
Kathleen A. Cagney ◽  
Fabrice Smieliauskas ◽  
David O. Meltzer ◽  
...  

2018 ◽  
Vol 133 (3) ◽  
pp. 329-337 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yingning Wang ◽  
Hai-Yen Sung ◽  
Tingting Yao ◽  
James Lightwood ◽  
Wendy Max

Objectives: Cigar use in the United States is a growing public health concern because of its increasing popularity. We estimated health care utilization and expenditures attributable to cigar smoking among US adults aged ≥35. Methods: We analyzed data on 84 178 adults using the 2000, 2005, 2010, and 2015 National Health Interview Surveys. We estimated zero-inflated Poisson (ZIP) regression models on hospital nights, emergency department (ED) visits, physician visits, and home-care visits as a function of tobacco use status—current sole cigar smokers (ie, smoke cigars only), current poly cigar smokers (smoke cigars and smoke cigarettes or use smokeless tobacco), former sole cigar smokers (used to smoke cigars only), former poly cigar smokers (used to smoke cigars and smoke cigarettes or use smokeless tobacco), other tobacco users (ever smoked cigarettes and used smokeless tobacco but not cigars), and never tobacco users (never smoked cigars, smoked cigarettes, or used smokeless tobacco)—and other covariates. We calculated health care utilization attributable to current and former sole cigar smoking based on the estimated ZIP models, and then we calculated total health care expenditures attributable to cigar smoking. Results: Current and former sole cigar smoking was associated with excess annual utilization of 72 137 hospital nights, 32 748 ED visits, and 420 118 home-care visits. Annual health care expenditures attributable to sole cigar smoking were $284 million ($625 per sole cigar smoker), and total annual health care expenditures attributable to sole and poly cigar smoking were $1.75 billion. Conclusions: Comprehensive tobacco control policies and interventions are needed to reduce cigar smoking and the associated health care burden.


2015 ◽  
Vol 33 (29_suppl) ◽  
pp. 155-155
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Ann Kvale ◽  
Gabrielle Rocque ◽  
Kerri S. Bevis ◽  
Aras Acemgil ◽  
Richard A. Taylor ◽  
...  

155 Background: Healthcare utilization and costs escalate near diagnosis and in the final months of life. There is a national trend toward aggressive care at end of life (EOL). We examined patterns in utilization and cost across the trajectory of care and during the last two weeks of life during implementation of a lay navigation intervention. Methods: Claims data were obtained for Medicare beneficiaries ≥ 65 years old with cancer in the UAB Health System Cancer Community Network (UAB CCN). For 10 quarters from January 2012 -June 2014, we examined healthcare utilization for the population at large, navigated patients, and decedents. All analyses included ER visits, hospitalizations, and ICU admissions and use of chemotherapy in the last 2 weeks of life, and hospice utilization (admission or less than 3 days of hospice) in the quarter of death for decedents. Descriptive analyses and linear regression were used to test trends over time; general linear models evaluated changes in health care utilization and cost. Results: Across the population reduction of 13.4% to 11% for hospitalization (18% decrease, p < 0.01), 8.0% to 7.1% for ER visits (12% decrease, p < 0.01), 2.9% to 2.5% for ICU admissions (14% decrease, p = 0.04) and an increase of 3.9% to 4.3% for hospice (9.2% increase p = 0.37) were found. Among 5,861 decedents, in the last 2 weeks of life, there were decreases in ICU admissions (14.6% decrease, p = 0.11), from 39.2% to 32.0%, ER visits (18.4% decrease, p = 0.03), and chemotherapy, from 4.7% to 3.5% (25.5% decrease, p = 0.11).Over the 10 quarters, hospice enrollment increased from 70.7% to 77.4% (9.48% increase; p = 0.06), and the proportion of patients on hospice for less than 3 days changed from 7.8% to 7.5% (3.85% decrease, p = 0.30). Costs decreased about $158 per quarter per beneficiary. A significant pre-post decrease of $952 per beneficiary (p < 0.01) led to an estimated reduction in Medicare costs of $18,406,920 for the 19,335 beneficiaries in the UAB CCN for the five quarters post-implementation. Conclusions: We observed decreased healthcare utilization and cost and trends toward decreased aggressive care at EOL in the UAB CCN. Further work is needed to determine the impact of navigation on utilization trends.


2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (6_suppl) ◽  
pp. 166-166
Author(s):  
Rahul Ramesh Khairnar ◽  
Mark Mishra ◽  
Ebere Onukwugha

166 Background: Previous studies assessing the impact of the United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) recommendations on utilization of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening have not investigated longer-term impacts of the 2008 recommendations nor have they investigated the impact of the 2012 recommendations in the Medicare population. The study aim was to evaluate change in utilization of PSA screening, post USPSTF recommendations of 2008 and 2012, and to assess trends and determinants of receipt of PSA screening in the Medicare population. Methods: This retrospective study of male Medicare beneficiaries utilized Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS) data and linked administrative claims from 2006-2013. Beneficiaries aged ≥65 years, with continuous enrollment in Parts A and B for each year they were surveyed were included in the study cohort. Beneficiaries with self-reported or claims-based diagnosis of prostate cancer were excluded. Beneficiaries with Medicare eligibility due to end stage renal disease or disability were also excluded. The primary outcome was receipt of PSA screening. Other measures include age groups (65-74 and ≥75), time periods (pre- and post-2008 and 2012 recommendations), and sociodemographic variables. Results: The study cohort consisted of 11,028 beneficiaries, who were predominantly white (87.56%), married (69.25%), and unemployed (84.4%); 52.21% beneficiaries were aged ≥75. Declining utilization trends for PSA screening were observed only in men aged ≥75 after 2008 recommendations and in both age groups after 2012 recommendations. The odds of receiving PSA screening declined by 17% percent in men aged ≥75 after the 2008 recommendations and by 29% in men aged ≥65 after the 2012 recommendations. Conclusions: The USPSTF recommendations of 2008 and 2012 against PSA screening were associated with declines in utilization of PSA screening during the study period. USPSTF recommendations play a significant role in affecting utilization patterns of health services. Future studies should evaluate if the proposed 2017 update to these recommendations advocating shared decision-making for PSA screening in men aged 55-69 increase utilization in this age-group.


2019 ◽  
Vol 77 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samantha Iovan ◽  
Paula M. Lantz ◽  
Katie Allan ◽  
Mahshid Abir

Interest in high users of acute care continues to grow as health care organizations look to deliver cost-effective and high-quality care to patients. Since “super-utilizers” of acute care are responsible for disproportionately high health care spending, many programs and interventions have been implemented to reduce medical care use and costs in this population. This article presents a systematic review of the peer-reviewed and grey literature on evaluations of interventions to decrease prehospital and emergency care use among U.S. super-utilizers. Forty-six distinct evaluations were included in the review. The most commonly evaluated intervention was case management. Although a number of interventions reported reductions in prehospital and emergency care utilization and costs, methodological and study design weaknesses—especially regression to the mean—were widespread and call into question reported positive findings. More high-quality research is needed to accurately assess the impact of interventions to reduce prehospital and emergency care use in the super-utilizer population.


Author(s):  
Michael E. Chernew ◽  
Dustin May

Health care cost growth is among the most important issues facing the United States and other developed countries. This article describes the rapid growth in expenditure in most developed countries, and discusses the factors that have driven this growth, such as population aging, general economic growth, and the adoption and use of new medical technologies. The public financing aspect of health care spending adds an additional dimension to assessing the impact of rapid health care cost growth. The article considers a range of strategies for slowing cost growth, including economic evaluation of technologies. Most health care systems employ some method of cost sharing as a means to reduce health care utilization. This article also discusses managed care plans that integrate the financing and delivery of care. However, as costs grow, pressures to control spending will grow and distributional issues will become even more salient.


2021 ◽  
pp. 104973232199204
Author(s):  
Rebecca M. Crocker

Barriers to health care access faced by Mexican immigrants in the United States have been well-documented, including lack of insurance, fear of deportation, and language barriers. However, little is known about this population’s care-seeking experiences before migration. In this article, I use a life-course approach to explore binational isolation from health care and the ways in which early-life experiences pattern Mexicans’ care-seeking practices in the United States. This ethnographic research project took place in Tucson, Arizona, between 2013 and 2014 and used semistructured interviews with service providers and first-generation Mexican immigrants. The majority of participants faced significant barriers to medical care in Mexico, which resulted in low rates of care utilization and heavy reliance on lay modalities. Immigrants faced an even broader array of barriers to care in the United States, and their lack of prior health care access further discouraged care utilization and compromised their medical care experiences after migration.


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