The Person Round Plan (PRPL) public use file is one in a series of data releases drawn from the 2020 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) Household Component (HC). This file contains records for persons insured through private establishments providing hospital/physician, medigap, dental, vision or prescription medication coverage and includes variables pertaining to managed care and experiences with plans. These are designed to facilitate research on the sometimes complex and dynamic relationships between consumers and their private insurance. 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 PRPL file is not a person-level file. Linking it to a MEPS full-year, person-level file requires users to make analytic decisions with an understanding of the complexity of the PRPL file. For more details on loading MEPS PUFs into R, SAS, and Stata, please visit the MEPS GitHub page. Update Notes
The files have been updated using the appropriate inflation factor. When the data were originally released in September 2022, an incorrect inflation factor had been applied, affecting OOPPREMX (monthly out-of-pocket premium amount) and OOPX12X (annual out-of-pocket premium amount).
Update #1: 4/24/2023
Premiums for employment-related policies that are imputed in the PRPL files are updated in subsequent years using an inflation factor. In 2020, an incorrect inflation factor was applied, affecting OOPPREMX (monthly out-of-pocket premium amount) and OOPX12X (annual out-of-pocket premium amount). This error affected 390 plans and 796 covered person records in Panel 24. The 2020 Person Round Plan File is currently unavailable while this error is being corrected.
*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.
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