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APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Recorded presentation

Steven Cohen, PhD, Center for Financing, Access and Cost Trends, AHRQ, 540 Gaither Road, Rockville, MD 20850, 3014271466, scohen@ahrq.gov, Diane Makuc, DrPH, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention/NCHS, NCHS, Belcrest Road, Hyattsville, MD 20872, and Trena Ezzati-Rice, MS, CFACT/DSRM, AHRQ, 540 Gaither Road, Rockville, MD 20850.

National estimates of health insurance status are essential inputs to policymakers to inform assessments of the population's access to medical care and analyses of health care expenditures. Alternative definitions of the uninsured include: those uninsured for a full-year, those ever uninsured during a year, and those uninsured at a specific point in time. Both the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) and the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) collect data that support these estimates and are also linked to each other through an integrated survey design. This design permits estimation of transitions in insurance coverage over time, based on two distinct approaches covering the same time periods: 1) transitions in coverage between NHIS (year 1) and the first year of MEPS (year 2) and 2) transitions in coverage between the first year of MEPS (year 1) and the second year of MEPS (year 2). The overlapping panel design of the MEPS facilitates comparisons of these approaches because at any point in time the MEPS includes respondents in their first year of the survey and others in their second year of the survey. This presentation describes the estimation of transitions of insurance status through the linkage of the MEPS and the NHIS and compares estimates derived using two approaches, those based on NHIS and MEPS data and those based on the first and second year of MEPS. The presentation concludes with a discussion of possible strategies that may improve the accuracy of these estimates of transitions in insurance coverage.

Learning Objectives:

• • Participants in the session will acquire information and perspectives regarding the capacity of the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) and the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) to permit analyses of the U.S. health care system including transitions in the population’s health insurance experience over time. Participants will learn of the statistical and methodological strategies adopted in MEPS and NHIS to improve the accuracy of resultant health insurance coverage estimates.
• • Participants will learn of inter-departmental efforts in the federal sector that have focused on research efforts and planned improvements to national health insurance data from the major federal surveys. This will include a discussion of the development, coordination and implementation of joint research, analytical, methodological and modeling agenda to improve the quality of these critical measures for policy formulation.
• • The methodologies that are presented have particular relevance as statistical tools to support longitudinal analyses of population subgroups that experience transitions in health insurance coverage over time.

Keywords: Health Insurance, Methodology

Related Web page: www.meps.ahrq.gov/PrintProducts/PrintProd_Detail.asp?ID=694&TABLE='Statistical%20Brief%20#84'&PPTYPE=

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Any relevant financial relationships? No

Recorded presentation