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5 Slide Series

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 July 2017 edition tabulates Medicare’s per capita costs in each state and U.S. territory, showing the level of cost variation that exists between jurisdictions. These figures are from 2015 and represent costs in the fee-for-service setting for Part A and Part B services.

The June edition raises concerns with how Medicaid policymaking is currently being approached and debated. We identify specific areas where excess costs exist in the program and where considerable savings can be achieved without diminishing Medicaid’s current coverage levels.

The May edition conveys the rapidly growing percentage of Medicaid prescriptions paid by managed care organizations (MCOs), and shows this progression in each state from 2013 through 2016

The April edition provides Medicaid MCO financial performance statistics for 2015 – a compilation of 199 MCO financial statements. Collectively the industry earned a 2.4% operating margin on Medicaid business during 2015 with 71% of the MCOs achieving a positive margin and 29% experiencing a loss. An interesting finding was that the health plans’ percent operating margins were not correlated with plan size.

The March edition tabulates the progression in Medicaid spending from 2012 – 2016, nationwide and with subtotals for states that did and didn’t adopt Medicaid expansion. One key statistic from this edition is that capitation rose from 25.7% of all Medicaid spending in 2012 to 48.7% in 2016 – the capitated model will likely represent the majority of Medicaid spending from 2017 forward.

The February edition tabulates overall health care expenditures from 2006-2016, and shows the progression of Medicaid, Medicare, and private health spending. A key observation from these tabulations is that health costs haven’t grown all that rapidly across the past decade – annual per capita cost increases have averaged 3.7% for the entire US population, 2.3% in Medicare, 3.2% in Medicaid, and 4.0% in the rest of the population.

The January edition tabulates the distribution of Medicaid pharmacy costs by unit price cohort. Explosive growth in the share of Medicaid prescriptions among drugs costing more than $1,000 per prescription (pre-rebate) continues to occur. These drugs now represent 40% of all Medicaid pre-rebate prescription drug expenditures.

The December Edition of the Series tabulates nationwide Medicaid prescription drug information from the beginning of 2015 through mid-2016. Some of the key findings are that Medicaid MCOs now pay for more than two-thirds of all Medicaid prescriptions, and that generics accounted for 81% of all Medicaid prescriptions but only 20% of Medicaid pre-rebate Rx expenditures during Q2 2016.

Volume #42 of our Series identifies the number of state prison inmates in each Medicaid expansion state, and describes opportunities to deliver community re-entry care coordination support.

Our October edition focuses on prescription drugs, tracking Medicaid’s nationwide unit price progression from 2013-2016 for each of the 25 NDCs generating the largest Medicaid expenditures. The average annual price increases across these 25 drugs was 10% (mean) and 8% (median), led by a more than doubling (133% overall increase) of the price of Epipen 2-Pak across the timeframe assessed.

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