This MEPS public use release is one in a series of data releases drawn from the 2004 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) Household Component (HC). This release contains the Person Round Plan (PRPL) file for 2004. 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, and STATA programming statements, and in SAS Transport format, the PRPL file is not a person-level file and linking it to a MEPS full year person-level file (e.g., HC-089 for year 2004) requires users making analytic decisions based on understanding the complexity of the PRPL file. Update Notes
The value of COVTYPIN (single or family coverage) was incorrectly set for a small number of plans. These cases have all four of the following conditions: (1) every coresiding family member’s coverage ceased before the end of the reference period (interview date or December 31st, so that EVALCOVR≠1), (2) the policyholder was a coresiding family member, (3) the plan did not cover anyone residing elsewhere, and (4) at least one coresiding dependent had coverage during the reference period. In these cases, COVTYPIN was erroneously set to single. Beginning in 2010, if coverage ceased for every coresiding family member before the end of the reference period, COVTYPIN is set to family if there were two or more persons covered any time during the reference period. Users can reset the values for these cases in prior years with the available data. An example in SAS follows:
proc sort data=h111 out=prpl; by eprsidx; run; data eprs(keep=eprsidx numin numever); set prpl; by eprsidx; retain numin numever; array stat{24} status1-status24; if first.eprsidx then do; numin=0; numever=0; end; if substr(dupersid,6,3) ne '901' then do; do i=1 to 24; if stat{i}=1 then covered=1; end; if covered=1 then numever=numever+1; if evalcovr=1 then numin=numin+1; end; if last.eprsidx then output eprs; run; data prplx(drop=numin numever covtypin rename=(covtypix=covtypin)); merge prpl eprs; by eprsidx; if numin=0 and covtypin=1 and numever>1 then covtypix=2; else covtypix=covtypin; label covtypix='COVERAGE: 1=SINGLE, 2=FAMILY'; run;
*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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