Medical Expenditure Panel Survey Public Use File Details

Font Size:

MEPS Home

About MEPS

:: Survey Background

:: Workshops & Events

:: Data Release Schedule

Survey Components

:: Household

:: Insurance/Employer

:: Medical Provider

:: Survey Questionnaires

Data and Statistics

:: Data Overview

:: MEPS Topics

:: Publications Search

:: MEPS Data Tools (HC/IC)

:: Data Files

:: Data Centers

Communication

:: What's New

:: Mailing List

:: Discussion Forum

:: Participants' Corner

MEPS HC-206B: 2018 Dental Visits File

printer-friendly

Release date: May 2020

	Notes on viewing and downloading files
	Printing tips

This public use data file is one in a series of event-level public use data files drawn from the 2018 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) Household Component (HC). Released as an ASCII file with SAS, SPSS, STATA, and R programming statements, a SAS transport file, a SAS V9 file, a XLSX file, and a Stata file, the Dental Visits File provides detailed information on dental events for a nationally representative sample of the civilian, noninstitutionalized population of the United States during the 2018 calendar year. This file consists of 2018 data obtained in the 2018 portion of round 3, and rounds 4 and 5 for Panel 22, as well as rounds 1, 2, and the 2018 portion of round 3 for Panel 23 of the survey (i.e., the rounds for the MEPS panels covering calendar year 2018), and contains variables pertaining to household reported dental visits. The file includes the date of the dental event, type of provider seen, procedure(s) associated with the dental event; flat fee information; imputed sources of payment; total payment and total charge of the dental event expenditure, and a full-year person-level weight.

Starting in 2018, instead of the XPORT engine, the CPORT procedure is used to create MEPS Public Use Files (PUFS) in transport format (excluding the 2018 Point-in-Time file, HC-036, and HC-036BRR). These CPORT data files (.ssp) cannot be read directly into R or Stata at this time. The ASCII (.dat) data file format can be used instead, along with the corresponding instructions found in the 'Programming Statements' files. In addition, SAS users must use the CIMPORT procedure to restore the transport files (.ssp) into SAS data sets. For more details on loading MEPS PUFs into R, SAS, and Stata, please visit the MEPS GitHub page

Update notes

Documentation

File type

Documentation	PDF (537 KB) / HTML
Codebook	PDF (276 KB) / HTML*
SAS Programming Statements	TXT (52 KB)
SPSS Programming Statements	TXT (12 KB)
STATA Programming Statements	TXT (16 KB)
R Programming Statements	TXT (6.4 KB)

Data	File type**

Data File, ASCII format

ZIP (680 KB) / EXE (1.2 MB)

Data File, SAS transport format

ZIP (812 KB) / EXE (1.3 MB)

Data File, SAS V9 format

ZIP (934 KB)

Data File, Stata format

ZIP (1.0 MB)

Data File, XLSX format

ZIP (3.1 MB)

Questionnaires — see Survey Questionnaires
The PDF version of the codebook is recommended for printing; the HTML version is database driven and lets you navigate quickly to details on each variable. *Right-click on the data file link, then select Save Target As or Save Link As to download the file.