Does Part D abet advantageous selection in Medicare Advantage?
Tony Han and
Kurt Lavetti
Journal of Health Economics, 2017, vol. 56, issue C, 368-382
Abstract:
The use of risk-adjustment formulae in setting payments to Medicare Advantage (MA) plans reduces the potential for advantageous selection on factors included in the formulae, but can theoretically worsen overall selection if plans are able to target beneficiaries based on excluded factors. Since MA medical risk-adjustment excludes prescription drug utilization, demand for drugs can be exploited by plans to induce advantageous selection. We show evidence that the introduction of Medicare Part D provided a mechanism for MA plans to increase selection, and that consumers responded, increasing MA market shares among beneficiaries taking drugs associated with the strongest advantageous selection incentives. For the average Medicare beneficiary in our sample, we estimate that this change in advantageous selection following the introduction of Medicare Part D increased the probability of enrolling in an MA plan by about 7.1%.
Keywords: Health insurance selection; Public provision of private insurance; Medicare Advantage (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H42 I11 I13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167629617305830
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jhecon:v:56:y:2017:i:c:p:368-382
DOI: 10.1016/j.jhealeco.2017.06.007
Access Statistics for this article
Journal of Health Economics is currently edited by J. P. Newhouse, A. J. Culyer, R. Frank, K. Claxton and T. McGuire
More articles in Journal of Health Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().