Medicare Part D and the financial protection of the elderly Center for Retirement Research working paper Financing, Personal Health Expenditures Insurance, Pharmaceutical Services -- economics Medicare Part D -- economics We examine the impact of the expansion of public prescription prescription-drug insurance coverage from Medicare Part D has had on the elderly and find evidence of substantial crowd-out. Using detailed data from the 2002-6 waves of the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), we estimate that the extension of Part D benefits resulted in 75% crowd-out of prescription drug insurance coverage and 33%-50% crowd-out of prescription drug expenditures of those 65 and older. Part D is associated with relatively small reductions in out-of-pocket spending. This suggests that the welfare gain from protecting the elderly from out-of-pocket spending risk through Part D has been small. Chestnut Hill, MA : Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, c2009 Engelhardt, Gary V. Gruber, Jonathan. Boston College. Center for Retirement Research. Technical Report Text Illustrations 44 p. nlm:nlmuid-101519291-pdf 101519291 http://resource.nlm.nih.gov/101519291 English United States Reproduced with permission of the copyright holder. Further use of the material is subject to CC BY license. https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0