Our 5 Slide Series allows us to regularly present objective analyses and trends on issues we believe are of interest and share our findings through data tabulations and visualizations.
The May edition outlines a pilot program we encourage Medicare policymakers to adopt. It involves testing Medicaid’s key design features in the Medicare arena, which if successful could evolve into a fundamental transformation of Medicare as has occurred with Medicaid (whose transformation also began with pilot testing of this approach). We will be releasing a full paper on this framework with a couple months.
- Keywords: Enrollment Medicare Policy
This edition describes a Pop-Up Clinic founded and led by one of our employees, Nehath Sheriff. This type of construct could be a low-cost, high-value option to consider for organizations seeking to “meet underserved subgroups where they are.”
This month’s edition analyzes and compares prescription volume and drug costs in the Medicaid and Medicare Part D programs. We tabulated pre-rebate cost per prescription for each program from 2013-2017. We also analyzed trends in specialty drug volume and expenditures during the same time period for each program.
- Keywords: Expenditures Medicaid Medicare Prescription Drugs
This edition assesses whether differences exist in overall economic performance that might help explain the Medicaid enrollment trend differences that were identified in our January 2019 edition of the Series. We have presented the unemployment rate progression from 2010 to 2017 by state, comparing aggregate unemployment rates across states that did and did not adopt Medicaid expansion.
- Keywords: Enrollment Expansion Medicaid
This edition tracks the national Medicaid enrollment projection from January 2014 through September 2017, showing enrollment growth dynamics between the expansion and non-expansion population, and across states that adopted Medicaid expansion versus those electing not to do so.
- Keywords: Enrollment Expansion Medicaid
This edition presents our tabulations on an “average family’s” federal, state and local taxes for CY2018 and how their tax contributions are spent.
- Keywords: Expenditures Medicaid Medicare Policy
Our November Edition of the 5 Slide Series focuses on the 2018 election results and conveys some of the potential implications of these results regarding Medicaid expansion.
October’s edition conveys some of our tabulations working with the recently published NCQA Medicaid health plan quality ratings for Rating Year 2018-2019. AmeriHealth Caritas and UnitedHealthcare are the two top-rated national chain organizations in terms of their average NCQA rating across the states they serve. Among the 13 Medicaid MCOs with a rating of 4.5 or above, the plans achieving this excellent quality score on the largest Medicaid membership base are Health Partners Plans in Pennsylvania, Neighborhood Health Plan of Rhode Island, and Priority Health in Michigan.
The September edition presents Medicaid data from our Pharmacy Practice, quantifying the differences in cost per prescription between the MCO and FFS settings in two selected high-volume therapeutic classes. In both drug classes (as occurs with Medicaid prescriptions overall), the MCO setting is achieving large percentage savings relative to FFS. However, the path taken to achieve these savings is quite different between the two drug classes shown.
- Keywords: Medicaid Prescription Drugs
The August edition quantifies Medicaid DSH payments, showing the progression of DSH spending in each state from 2013-2017. The key takeaway is that Medicaid DSH has not dropped at all across the expansion states since 2013, even though this was intended to occur as one of the mechanisms to help offset the Federal costs of Medicaid expansion.
- Keywords: Expansion Expenditures Medicaid