This file is a two-year longitudinal file derived from the respondents to the MEPS Panel 22 sample. Released as an ASCII file with SAS, SPSS, and STATA programming statements, a SAS transport file, a SAS V9 file, a XLSX file, and a Stata file, the persons on this data set represent those who were in the MEPS population (U.S. civilian noninstitutionalized) for all or part of the 2017-2018 period. The file contains a longitudinal weight variable (LONGWT) and all variables from the 2017 and 2018 full-year consolidated data files (HC-201 and HC-209, respectively). The weight variable (LONGWT), when applied to the persons who participated in both 2017 and 2018, will enable the user to make national estimates of person-level changes in selected variables (e.g., health insurance, health status, utilization and expenditures). In addition, LONGWT can be used to develop cross-sectional type estimates for the two-year period and for each year individually based on only the Panel 22 sample.
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
*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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