The COVID-19 pandemic's impact on all-cause mortality disparities in Medicare: By race, income, chronic health, mental/behavioral health, disability

BACKGROUND: The Medicare-enrolled population is heterogeneous across race, ethnicity, age, dual eligibility, and a breadth of chronic health, mental and behavioral health, and disability-related conditions, which may be differentially impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. OBJECTIVE: To quantify changes in all-cause mortality prior-to and in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic across Medicare's different sociodemographic and health-condition subpopulations. METHODS: This observational, population-based study used stratified bivariate regression to investigate Medicare fee-for-service subpopulation differences in pre-pandemic (i.e., 2019 versus 2016) and pandemic-related (2020 versus 2019) changes in all-cause mortality. RESULTS: All-cause mortality in the combined Medicare-Advantage (i.e., managed care) and fee-for-service beneficiary population improved by a relative 1% in the ten years that preceded the COVID-19 pandemic, but then escalated by a relative 15.9% in 2020, the pandemic's first year. However, a closer look at Medicare's fee-for-service subpopulations reveals critical differences. All-cause mortality had actually been worsening prior to the pandemic among most psychiatric and disability-related condition groups, all race and ethnicity groups except White Non-Hispanic, and Medicare-Medicaid dual-eligible (i.e., low-income) beneficiaries. Many of these groups then experienced all-cause mortality spikes in 2020 that were over twice that of the overall Medicare fee-for-service population. Of all 61 chronic health conditions studied, beneficiaries with schizophrenia were the most adversely affected, with all-cause mortality increasing 38.4% between 2019 and 2020. CONCLUSION: This analysis reveals subpopulation differences in all-cause mortality trends, both prior to and in year-one of the COVID-19 pandemic, indicating that the events of 2020 exacerbated preexisting health-related inequities.