Improving Decision-making by Older Adults in the Medicare Part D Program

In order to better understand potential sources of decision errors in the Medicare Part D market and the ways in which plan selection may be improved, we propose to conduct two survey-based randomized pilot experiments with the following aims:
Aim 1- Ascertain older adults’ valuations of various Medicare prescription drug plan attributes and evaluate the stability of these preferences to differing levels of risk and the salience of financial plan information.
Aim 2- Examine how older adults weight Part D plan attributes when provided with an external decision rule (i.e., cost minimize) and to determine if these decision weights can be modified with changes to the way financial plan information is presented on the Plan Finder tool.