Previous studies performed in obstetric and surgical populations have demonstrated that antiplatelet therapy does not increase the risk of spinal hematoma associated with spinal or epidural anesthesia and analgesia. We confirm the safety of epidural steroid injection in patients receiving aspirin-like medications.

Across a range of contexts, researchers are reevaluating the long-held view that consumers benefit from being offered more options. A leading challenge to this view is the hypothesis that facing more options impairs decision making through a set of phenomena known as "choice overload" (Diehl and Poynor 2010; Iyengar and Lepper 2000), "status quo bias" (Samuelson and Zeckhauser 1988), "inertia" (Dube, Hitsch, and Rossi 2010) and "the paradox of choice" in which "more is less" (Schwartz 2004). Each of these terms carries somewhat different connotations and is ascribed to various underlying economic and psychological causes. Their common predictions, however, are that facing more options makes consumers less satisfied with their available options and with their chosen options and more likely to stay with their status quo, even if the status quo is making no purchase at all. Yet a recent experiment on the elderly population specifically (Besedeš et al. 2012) and a meta-analysis by yield conclusions antipodal to these other frequently cited studies, concluding instead that consumers benefit from additional options.

Introduction: Nonadherence to taking prescribed antihypertensive medication (antihypertensive) regimens has been identified as a leading cause of poor blood pressure control among persons with hypertension and an important risk factor for adverse cardiovascular disease outcomes. CDC and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services analyzed geographic, racial-ethnic, and other disparities in nonadherence to antihypertensives among Medicare Part D beneficiaries in 2014. Methods: Antihypertensive nonadherence, defined as a proportion of days a beneficiary was covered with antihypertensives of <80%, was assessed using prescription drug claims data among Medicare Advantage or Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries aged ≥65 years with Medicare Part D coverage during 2014 (N = 18.5 million). Analyses were stratified by antihypertensive class, beneficiaries' state and county of residence, type of prescription drug plan, and treatment and demographic characteristics. Conclusions and Implications for Public Health Practice: More than one in four Medicare Part D beneficiaries using antihypertensives were nonadherent to their regimen, and certain racial/ethnic groups, states, and geographic areas were at increased risk for nonadherence. These findings can help inform focused interventions among these groups, which might improve blood pressure control and cardiovascular disease outcomes.

Consumers' enrollment decisions in Medicare Part D can be explained by Abaluck and Gruber's (2011) model of utility maximization with psychological biases or by a neoclassical version of their model that precludes such biases. We evaluate these competing hypotheses by applying nonparametric tests of utility maximization and model validation tests to administrative data. We find that 79 percent of enrollment decisions from 2006 to 2010 satisfied basic axioms of consumer theory under the assumption of full information. The validation tests provide evidence against widespread psychological biases. In particular, we find that precluding psychological biases improves the structural model's out-of-sample predictions for consumer behavior. (JEL C52, D12, I13, I18, J14)

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