Matt Jans's List: ACA surveys

• One approach that surveys take is to ask about coverage at the time of the interview.
• Other surveys, such as the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), are conducted throughout the year.
• Another approach taken in surveys is to ask about coverage for a particular period in the past. For example, the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) asks respondents about their coverage for the current month and for specific prior months, and survey results report coverage for each month.
• Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement (CPS ASEC) asked respondents if they had various types of coverage during the preceding calendar year.
• the Census Bureau concluded that respondents were more likely reporting coverage at the time of the interview than coverage in the previous year, which means that the results were not responsive to the question being asked and that the findings were ambiguous as to the period over which coverage was being measured.¹
• asks respondents about their current coverage and about their coverage for each month back to January of the preceding year.²
• Private Surveys
• In some cases, such as the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index (“Gallup”), these are broad public opinion surveys that contain a few questions related to health insurance. In other cases, such as Urban Institute’s Health Reform Monitoring Survey (“HRMS”), the Rand Health Reform Opinion Survey (“RAND”) and our Kaiser California Uninsured Panel Survey, surveys were developed specifically to track ACA implementation. Others, like our Kaiser Health Tracking Poll, focus mainly on opinions, knowledge and early experiences rather than on measuring changes in the share of people with health insurance or non-group coverage.
• (Our own monthly tracking poll has shown a similar reduction in the number of adults uninsured at the beginning of 2014, though the survey was not designed to detect such changes, which are generally within the poll’s margin of error in any given month.
• The three surveys agree that the number of uninsured people has gone down, despite using very different sampling approaches: Gallup accumulates response from their daily tracking poll, which uses telephone interviews of a random sample of adults each day⁶; HRMS is based on interviews from successive samples of an internet panel, which was randomly selected⁷; and RAND is based on repeated interviewing of the same group of adults in an internet panel, a portion of which were randomly selected and a portion of which are from a convenience sample.⁸
• Table 1: Early Results from Surveys of Coverage Under the ACA Conducted by Private Entities
• National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), the Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC) of the Current Population Survey, and the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). These surveys collect d
• Table 2: Availability of Post-ACA Health Insurance Coverage Data from Major Federal Surveys
• Pascale, Joanne. “Findings from a Pretest of a New Approach to Measuring Health Insurance in the Current Population Survey.” Statistical Research Division, U.S. Census Bureau, Nov. 16, 2009. http://www.census.gov/srd/papers/pdf/rsm2009-07.pdf#page=10.
• Brault, Matthew; Medalia Carla; O’Hara, Brett; Rodean, Jonathan; and Steinweg, Amy. "Changing the CPS Health Insurance Questions And The Implications On The Uninsured Rate: Redesign and Production Estimates.” U.S. Census Bureau, Feb. 3, 2014. www.census.gov/hhes/www/hlthins/publications/sehsd_wp_2014-16.pdf.
• “Data Note: Attempting to Measure Early Impact of the ACA through National Public Opinion Polls- A Note of Caution and What to Watch For”. Kaiser Family Foundation, Nov. 22, 2013. http://kff.org/health-reform/poll-finding/data-note-measuring-aca-early-impact-through-national-polls/.

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