Use of Welcome to Medicare Visits Among Older Adults Following the Affordable Care Act

To encourage greater utilization of preventive services among Medicare beneficiaries, the 2010 Affordable Care Act waived coinsurance for the Welcome to Medicare visit, making this benefit free starting in 2011. The objective of this study was to determine the impact of the Affordable Care Act on Welcome to Medicare visit utilization. A 5% sample of newly enrolled fee-for-service Medicare beneficiaries for 2005–2016 was used to estimate changes in Welcome to Medicare visit use over time. An interrupted time series model examined whether Welcome to Medicare visits increased significantly after 2011, controlling for pre-intervention trends and other autocorrelation. Annual Welcome to Medicare visit rates began at 1.4% in 2005 and increased to 12.3% by 2016. The quarterly Welcome to Medicare visit rate, which was almost 1% at baseline, was increasing by 0.06% before the 2011 Affordable Care Act provision (p