Medicare

This fact sheet from the AARP Public Policy Institute provides 10 key facts about the Medicare population. It includes information about age, health, coverage, financial resources, and more.

This Spotlight from the AARP Public Policy Institute discusses the Medicare home health benefit that serves millions of Americans. The Medicare home health benefit allows many homebound older adults to get skilled care in their homes. This Spotlight includes information about Medicare rules for coverage of home health care services.

This new report developed by the Medicare Rights Center for the National Council on Aging shares how some states are working to ensure seamless coverage for low-income individuals transitioning from expansion Medicaid to Medicare. The report highlights promising state-specific practices that other states might adopt, as well as barriers that states will work through in their own ways, seeking the most seamless coverage possible for lower-income older adults and people with disabilities.

This brief from the SCAN Foundation summarizes lessons learned and offers recommendations for improving integrated systems of care for people with Medicare and Medicaid, also known as dually eligible individuals. The brief draws from three years of California’s Cal MediConnect evaluation results.

This brief from the Integrated Care Resource Center discusses opportunities for Medicaid agencies to partner with State Health Insurance Programs (SHIPs). Every state has a SHIP that is responsible for providing counseling and assistance for people with Medicare and their families. This brief highlights approaches used by Arizona, Massachusetts, and Texas, where SHIPs and Medicaid agencies have worked together to educate Medicare-Medicaid enrollees on new care delivery options.

The Integrated Care Resource Center published an issue brief about the issues and options that states have when contracting with Medicare Advantage Dual Eligible Special Needs Plans.

The Medicare Board of Trustees issued the 2016 report to Congress on the financial operations and actuarial status of the program. Medicare is the second-largest social insurance program in the U.S., with 55.3 million beneficiaries. The trustees projected that the Hospital Insurance Trust Fund will remain fully funded until 2028, 11 years longer than projected before the Affordable Care Act. Further analysis of expenditure growth overall and each part of the program is included in the report.

Mathematica Policy Research released a report that evaluated the implementation and impacts of Comprehensive Primary Care (CPC) initiative over its first two years. In October of 2012, the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) under the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) launched the CPC initiative to test a new model of care delivery for about 500 primary care practices. This report also evaluates how different factors, like participation, have changed.

Hospital readmissions are a large source of wasteful healthcare spending, and current care transition models are too expensive to be sustainable. One way to circumvent cost-prohibitive care transition programs is complement nurse-staffed care transition programs with those staffed by less expensive nonmedical workers. A major barrier to utilizing nonmedical workers is determining the appropriate time to escalate care to a clinician with a wider scope of practice.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) released the annual Nursing Facility initiative report. This report summarizes the impacts from the three-year-old initiative that tests the ways to reduce avoidable hospitalizations. Research from CMS shows that "approximately 45%" of hospitalizations could be prevented with the proper interventions. This report uses the data from experience during the second performance year of the initiative in 2014.