Medicare Part D Saved 27,000 People With CVD Treatment Access

The Medicare prescription-drug benefit introduced in 2006 saved an estimated 19,000 to 27,000 lives in its first year by expanding access to medications that treat cardiovascular killers like strokes and heart disease, according to new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

“While the exact magnitude of the number of lives saved depends on the particular specification, the basic result of a decline in cardiovascular-related deaths is shown to hold up across a multitude of robustness tests,” economists Abe Dunn and Adam Hale Shapiro wrote this month in a working paper, “Does Medicare Part D Save Lives?”

The Part D benefit, enacted by Congress in 2003 and introduced in 2006, subsidized drug coverage for elderly and disabled Americans through the Medicare program.

Read more: http://on.wsj.com/1Anr0fO

Source: Wall Street Journal