Context: Patients in rural areas may use less medical care than those living in urban areas. This could be due to differences in travel distance and time and a utilization of a different mix of generalists and specialists for their care. Purpose: To compare the travel times, distances, and physician specialty mix of all Medicare patients living in…

Purpose: To examine the prevalence and characteristics of community-dwelling Medicare beneficiaries reporting a communication disability and the relationship between that disability and dissatisfaction with medical care. Method: A total of 12,769 Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey respondents age 65 and older in 2001 were categorized by level of…

Developed an approach to constructing an aggregate index of health at the population level with data from Medicare beneficiaries using the 1991 (n=12,667), 1995 (n=15,590), and 1997 (n=17,058) Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS). Findings suggest that in addition to mortality, morbidity appears to play a significant role in years of healthy…

Background: In the mid-1990s, significant gaps existed in the quality of acute myocardial infarction (AMI) care between rural and urban hospitals. Since then, overall AMI care quality has improved. This study uses more recent data to determine whether rural-urban AMI quality gaps have persisted. Methods: Using inpatient records data for 34,776…

Medicare's Incentive Payment (MIP) program provides a 10% bonus payment to providers who treat Medicare patients in rural and urban areas where there is a shortage of generalist physicians. Purpose: To examine the experience of Alaska, Idaho, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Washington with the MIP program. We determined the program's…