$3M NIH Grant to Study Whether Medicare Advantage's Grocery and Transport Benefits Actually Help Patients

In 2020, Medicare quietly expanded what private Medicare Advantage plans are allowed to offer their members. Beyond standard medical coverage, plans could now provide supplemental benefits addressing what policy researchers call social determinants of health: groceries, meal deliveries, utility assistance, transportation to appointments, pest control, and air filters. The expansion was sweeping in scope and has been rapidly adopted - by 2025, more than 30% of Medicare Advantage plans had incorporated at least some of these benefits, with that figure exceeding 90% among dual-eligible special needs plans serving the lowest-income beneficiaries.

What nobody has done yet is measure whether any of it works.

That gap is now the subject of a five-year research program at George Mason University, funded by an approximately $3 million R01 grant from the National Institute on Aging. Health economist Jeah Jung, a professor in the Department of Health Administration and Policy, will lead the study.

The Scale of What Is Being Examined

Medicare Advantage now covers 55% of all Medicare beneficiaries - 34.4 million Americans as of 2025. It is the dominant form of Medicare coverage in the United States, having surpassed traditional fee-for-service Medicare in enrollment. The supplemental benefit expansion represents one of the largest federal efforts to address social needs through a health insurance mechanism, yet it launched without a built-in evaluation framework.

"This is a really large-scale initiative by Medicare to address unmet social needs and see whether that helps maintain and improve beneficiaries' health outcomes as well," Jung said. "With an investment of this size, we want to see evidence on how it's working and who it's reaching so the policy can be refined in the future."

What the Study Will Measure

The research will use secure Medicare administrative data to track outcomes among people enrolled in plans offering the supplemental benefits versus those without. The primary outcomes include emergency department visits, hospitalizations, and nursing home entry - the latter being a particularly consequential outcome both for patients and for Medicare costs. The study will also examine uptake: who actually uses these benefits, and whether utilization varies by race, ethnicity, sex, health risk level, and area-level socioeconomic factors.

"Health-related social needs, such as food security, housing quality, reliable transportation, and social support, are increasingly recognized as important contributors to individuals' health," Jung said. "There is currently no information or evidence of how many people are using it, how they're using it, and whether it's actually bringing the intended outcomes."

Contributors from Oregon Health and Science University and Dartmouth College are serving as co-investigators. Emily Ihara, professor and chair of the Department of Social Work in the College of Public Health at George Mason, is also part of the team.

What Rides on the Answer

The stakes are not only scientific. Medicare Advantage plans have considerable latitude in designing supplemental benefit packages, and there is no standardized set of offerings across plans or regions. If the study finds that specific benefit types - say, meal delivery for food-insecure enrollees - consistently reduce hospitalizations, that evidence could inform both regulatory guidance and plan design. If the benefits prove largely unused or poorly targeted, that too would be valuable information for a program absorbing substantial premiums.

The findings will not be available for several years - the grant is a five-year award and will rely on administrative data that accumulates over time. But given that tens of millions of Americans are already enrolled in plans with these benefits, and given that the policy shift occurred without a randomized trial design, this observational study represents one of the few ways to assess impact at scale.