Medical Expenditure Panel Survey Public Use File Details

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MEPS HC-229A: 2021 Prescribed Medicines File

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Release date: July 2023

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This file is one in a series of public use event files from the 2021 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 2021. Each record represents one household-reported prescribed medicine that was purchased during calendar year 2021. These data were collected during the 2021 portion of Round 7, and all of Rounds 8 and 9 for Panel 23; the 2021 portion of Rounds 5 and 7, and all of Round 6 for Panel 24; the 2021 portion of Round 3 and all of Rounds 4 and 5 for Panel 25; and Rounds 1, 2, and the 2021 portion of Round 3 for Panel 26 (i.e., the rounds for the MEPS panels covering the calendar year 2021). This year, 2021, is the first data year to include four panels of data. Because of concerns about lower response rates due to COVID-19, Panels 23 and 24 were extended to include 9 rounds of data collection; data for Rounds 7, 8, and 9 for Panel 23 and Rounds 5, 6, and 7 for Panel 24 are included in the 2021 data files. 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, selected Multum Lexicon variables, etc.); 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. For more details on loading MEPS PUFs into R, SAS, and Stata, please visit the MEPS GitHub page

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Documentation

File type

Documentation	PDF (815 KB) / HTML
Codebook	PDF (258 KB) / HTML*
SAS Programming Statements	TXT (60 KB)
SPSS Programming Statements	TXT (354 KB)
STATA Programming Statements	TXT (358 KB)
R Programming Statements	TXT (8.7 KB)

Data	File type**

Data File, ASCII format

ZIP (7.7 MB)

Data File, SAS transport format

ZIP (7.6 MB)

Data File, SAS V9 format

ZIP (9.0 MB)

Data File, Stata format

ZIP (8.7 MB)

Data File, XLSX format

ZIP (43 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.