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| MEPS HC-206A: 2018 Prescribed Medicines File |
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Release date: July 2020
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This file is one in a series of public use event files from the 2018 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey Household Component (MEPS HC) and Medical Provider Component (MPC). Released as an ASCII data file, a SAS transport file, a SAS V9 file, a XLSX file, and a Stata file (with SAS, STATA, SPSS, and R user statements) this public use file provides detailed information on household-reported prescribed medicines for a nationally representative sample of the civilian noninstitutionalized population of the United States and can be used to make estimates of prescribed medicine utilization and expenditures for calendar year 2018. Each record represents one household-reported prescribed medicine that was purchased during calendar year 2018. These data were collected during 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 MEPS HC. Each record on this event file represents a unique prescribed medicine event; that is, a prescribed medicine reported as being purchased or otherwise obtained by the household respondent, and includes the following: an identifier for each unique prescribed medicine; detailed characteristics associated with the event (e.g., national drug code (NDC), medicine name, etc.); selected Multum Lexicon variables; the date on which the person first used the medicine; total expenditure and sources of payments; types of pharmacies that filled the household's prescriptions; 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
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Update notes
| Documentation |
PDF (1.0 MB)
/ HTML
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| Codebook |
PDF (319 KB)
/ HTML*
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| SAS Programming Statements |
TXT (59 KB) |
| SPSS Programming Statements |
TXT (349 KB) |
| STATA Programming Statements |
TXT (353 KB) |
| R Programming Statements |
TXT (7.0 KB) |
| Data File, ASCII format |
ZIP (8.0 MB)
/ EXE (8.5 MB)
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| Data File, SAS transport format |
ZIP (7.9 MB)
/ EXE (8.4 MB)
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| Data File, SAS V9 format |
ZIP (10 MB)
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| Data File, Stata format |
ZIP (14 MB)
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| Data File, XLSX format |
ZIP (45 MB)
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— see Survey Questionnaires
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*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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