Medicare Health and Prescription Drug Plan Tracker

The Kaiser Family Foundation has updated its interactive online resource, the Medicare Health and Prescription Drug Plan Tracker, with new 2009 data about Medicare Advantage and Medicare Prescription Drug Plans and with 2008 enrollment data.

The tracker provides information on stand-alone prescription drug plans nationally and by state and on Medicare Advantage plans by region and county. Medicare Advantage plans include Medicare HMOs, regional and local PPOs, private fee-for-service plans, and special needs plans. The resource can be used to monitor trends for Medicare Advantage plans since 1999 and for Medicare Part D plans since their inception in 2006.

For instance, the tracker can be used to tease out key information such as:

• While 21 percent of all Medicare beneficiaries nationwide are enrolled in a Medicare Advantage plan, penetration varies from 0.3 percent of beneficiaries in Alaska to nearly 39 percent in Oregon. Since 2006, Michigan has experienced the largest increase in the share of Medicare beneficiaries enrolled in Advantage plans, from 5.5 percent to 21.3 percent.
  
• Enrollment in Medicare private fee-for-service plans has more than doubled since 2006, reaching almost 2.2 million enrollees in 2008. Michigan has the highest share of Medicare beneficiaries enrolled in private fee-for-service plans (17 percent).
  
• Beneficiaries in each state have a choice of more than 45 stand-alone prescription drug plans, with beneficiaries in Pennsylvania and West Virginia having 57 such options – the most in the country.
  
• In 2008, over 9 million Medicare beneficiaries received extra assistance with their prescription drug costs through the drug benefit’s low-income subsidy program. California had the most beneficiaries who received the low-income subsidy (1.2 million), followed by New York (0.7 million) and Texas (0.6 million).

The Medicare Health and Prescription Drug Plan Tracker is available online.