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-208: 2018 Person Round Plan File

printer-friendly

Release date: August 2020

	Notes on viewing and downloading files
	Printing tips

This MEPS public use release is one in a series of data releases drawn from the 2018 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) Household Component (HC). This release contains the Person Round Plan (PRPL) file for 2018. 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 and linking it to a MEPS full year person-level file requires users making analytic decisions based on understanding the complexity of the PRPL file.

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 (472 KB) / HTML
Codebook	PDF (248 KB) / HTML*
SAS Programming Statements	TXT (45 KB)
SPSS Programming Statements	TXT (16 KB)
STATA Programming Statements	TXT (22 KB)
R Programming Statements	TXT (6.8 KB)

Data	File type**

Data File, ASCII format

ZIP (1.2 MB) / EXE (12 MB)

Data File, SAS transport format

ZIP (1.4 MB) / EXE (1.7 MB)

Data File, SAS V9 format

ZIP (1.6 MB)

Data File, Stata format

ZIP (1.9 MB)

Data File, XLSX format

ZIP (7.4 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.