Medicare Part D: Annotated Bibliography

Medicare Part D In Urban Health Planning class we often discussed about several topics related to the health care system. For this assignment we needed to examine two peer reviewed journal articles on the topic that we find interesting. I choose the topic Medicare because we all are going to be old someday and might need Medicare to support ourselves. Medicare is a health insurance program for a person older than 65 and also younger person who has disabilities. So for this assignment I looked up two articles that discussed about Medicare part D. Medicare Part D Research Highlights and Policy Updates, 2013: Impact and Insights Written by JoAnn Stubbings, BSPharm, MHCA1, and Denys T. Lau and the other article Primary Care Physicians’ Views of

Ketcham, have gave a more insight view of Medicare program specially the section part D. Medicare Part D is the federal government benefit for prescription drug where the government subsidizes the cost of prescription drug and the drug insurance premium. First of all, the peer-review article, Medicare Part D Research Highlights and Policy Updates, 2013: Impact and Insights Written by JoAnn Stubbings, BSPharm, MHCA1, and Denys T. Lau, stated some facts about Medicare Part D. This article mentioned that the Medicare Part D program was first implemented in 2006 and also it has evolved a lot to be more beneficiary for the patient. This article focused on key research that was published in 2012 which has highlighted some initiative for Part D in 2013. And to do more research on it, Pubmed and Medline started to do research

Epstein, Saif S. Rathore, Caleb Alexander, and Jonathan D. Ketcham has given the view of the physicians on Part D of Medicare. In this peer reviewed article the authors also has done some research to examine the attitude of physicians about the impact of Medicare Part D. The authors tried to research on how Medicare Part D varied among the senior citizen specially the citizen has Medicare and Medicaid dual eligibility. For the study they have designed a web based survey in four states North Carolina, Florida, Texas and Massachusetts. However, the researchers mainly focused of the differences in result of North Carolina from the other states. During the research, they found the result showing 48% physicians were in favor of Part D while 37% physicians were in oppose of Part D of Medicare. The article also stated that 55% reported that Part D has improved the access to prescription drugs, however 44% has also reported that access of was declined for individual who had prior drug coverage. The article has also stated that there were 49% physicans that reported that dual eligibility access was really bad under Part D of Medicare in 2007 relative to 2006 when it was started. The physicians also reported that in North Carolina, Part D of Medicare has lowered the dual eligibility access compared to Florida, Texas and Massachusetts. Through this research, they found that the