Informing Decisions on Medicare Prescription Drug Plan Market Areas

Mathematica and its research partner, the Center for Studying Health System Change, provided technical assistance and analysis on alternative ways of defining market areas for the prescription drug plans that began in 2006 under the new Medicare Modernization Act. We developed a variety of conceptual frameworks that could underpin the definition of a market area, evaluated existing data that could be used to set market area boundaries and make recommendations, and offered a framework for data collection and modeling efforts related to the market area definitions. This study was funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation.