Tag: COVID-19
Building upon our 2014 report titled Prescription Drug Adherence in Medicaid Managed Care, this report provides updated analyses performed on medication adherence, assesses the impacts of Medicaid expansion and the COVID-19 pandemic on medication adherence, and offers recommendations for further improvement to Medicaid medication access and adherence.
- Additional Resources: Executive Summary Summary Slides
- Keywords: COVID-19 Medicaid Policy Prescription Drugs
This edition conveys some of our perspectives related to the current reinstatement of Medicaid redeterminations. This is an important time period to capture (and share) detailed information on how Medicaid enrollees can best be successfully reached, as well as the dynamics of continuous enrollment, coverage retention and loss. We delineate several specific data points that will be valuable to collect.
- Keywords: COVID-19 Enrollment Medicaid Policy
This edition focuses on the share of the overall population that receives Medicaid, and how this percentage has trended throughout the past decade nationally and state by state. Between Medicaid expansion, COVID dynamics, and some shifts in the economy’s performance, the past ten years have created several interesting Medicaid enrollment trends and large-scale shifts. Altogether, Medicaid enrollment jumped up 57% from 2013-2022, an increase of 36.2 million persons. Kentucky has experienced the largest rate of growth, ranking 42nd during 2013 in terms of the proportion of its overall population receiving Medicaid coverage and moving all the way to 8th as of 2022.
- Keywords: COVID-19 Enrollment Medicaid Policy
This edition conveys tabulations on overall death rates and COVID death rates by state, including grouping states by the Governor’s political party.
- Keywords: COVID-19
This edition looks at the progression of COVID deaths and death rates by year in different cohorts (e.g., age and race/ethnicity).
- Keywords: COVID-19
This edition looks at the collective financial performance of a large group of MCOs across the 2018-2021 timeframe. Our key findings are that the health plans performed quite well during the COVID-impacted years of 2020 and 2021 – better than they had performed during the pre-COVID years of 2018 and 2019. Revenues and operating margins grew particularly sharply across these health plans’ Medicaid line of business during 2020 and 2021.
- Keywords: COVID-19 Financial Performance
This edition presents the progression of large publicly traded health companies’ stock prices from January 1, 2019 through July 1, 2022. Our key purpose was to summarize stock prices through the COVID pandemic relative to the year before the pandemic began. While the pandemic has been devastating to thousands of small business, the large publicly traded companies fared pretty well as a group during the pandemic. Large health companies stock prices fared even better. Health insurance companies’ stock prices rose faster still, averaging a 55% increase from January 1, 2020 to July 1, 2022).
- Keywords: COVID-19
This edition quantifies the decrease in Medicaid prescription volume that has occurred during COVID, comparing usage during calendar years 2019, 2020, and 2021. The large decrease that has occurred – 16.4% from 2019 to 2021 on a per covered person basis — is highly concerning regarding its implications regarding the poverty population’s access to needed medications during the pandemic.
- Keywords: COVID-19 Medicaid Prescription Drugs
This edition of our 5 Slide Series examines excess deaths at the state level during the pandemic. Taking the difference of average monthly deaths during the pandemic and a pre-pandemic average, we find that states in the South and Southwest have experienced the largest percentage increase in deaths above normal. In addition, despite experiencing a particularly deadly first wave in the spring of 2020, New England states have collectively experienced the lowest number of excess deaths per capita; we find that 5 of the 11 states with the least number of excess deaths per capita are in this region. Second, we estimate excess deaths among different cohorts, including age, race/ethnicity, and cause of death. For age, we find that the 25–44 age bracket experienced the sharpest percentage increase in all-cause observed deaths in 2020 and 2021 compared to its 2015-2019 historical average. For race, we find that Hispanics experienced the sharpest percentage increase in all-cause observed deaths in 2020 and 2021, followed by American Indians/Alaska Natives and Asians. Lastly, we use cause of death data to confirm that deaths from Alzheimer’s disease/dementia increased the most during the pandemic, followed by deaths from circulatory disease. This latter finding dovetails with our February 4th edition, which showed that COVID deaths have likely been substantially undercounted. The spike in Alzheimer’s deaths could involve COVID death categorization dynamics.
- Keywords: COVID-19
This edition examines the impact of the pandemic on overall deaths in 2020 and 2021. Comparing excess deaths (deaths above the pre-COVID annual average) at the national level from April 2020 to December 2021, we find that annual deaths in the US were more than one-fifth higher in 2020 and 2021 than they were on average between 2017 and 2019. We calculate 1.09 million excess deaths have occurred during the pandemic to date, which is about 264,000 (32%) above the number of COVID-confirmed deaths during this time (831,000). We also find the population-adjusted per capita death rate increased by 18% during the pandemic years compared to the pre-pandemic baseline – well above the second largest annual death increase in the last twenty years experienced between 2014 and 2015 (2.5%).
- Keywords: COVID-19