Informing Health Initiatives

Summary of Requests and Assistance Provided, April 2011-July 2011

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A summary of requests to the Center for Financing, Access, and Cost Trends (CFACT) for information to inform health initiatives, and of the assistance provided from September 2011 through July 2011.

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Source of Request	Request	Date	Staff Responsible	Assistance Provided
Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE), HHS	Analysis of assets of uninsured families	4/11	Jessica Banthin and Didem Bernard	Provided a detailed analysis of the assets held by uninsured families. The analysis updated estimates published in Health Affairs with more recent MEPS data, and presented several different definitions of financial assets and net worth. Median values by quantile and income groups for both the insured and uninsured were sent to ASPE. The request originated with Rick Kronick. It forms a key part of the ASPE Brief titled, The Value of Health Insurance: Few of the Uninsured Have Adequate Resources to Pay Potential Hospital Bills (May 2011).
Office of Tax Analysis, U.S. Department of the Treasury	Monthly expenditure files from MEPS to assign specific events to certain months	4/11	Tom Selden	Provided segments of AHRQ microsimulation databases and produced updated "monthly expenditure" files for 2008 by applying algorithms to assign events from the MEPS event files to specific months.
Congressional Budget Office	Simulation of the Medicaid eligibility units in the KIDSIM microsimulation model	5/11	Julie Hudson, Jessica Banthin, and Tom Selden	Provided a memo summarizing the programs and secondary source variables used to indentify Medicaid units in the KIDSIM model.
Congressional Budget Office	Size of the non-group market and average length of spell of non-group coverage	5/11	Jessica Banthin	Provided estimates from the MEPS on the size of the non-group health insurance markets and the average lengths of spells of non-group coverage.
Congressional Budget Office	National expenditure estimates of persons who died in a given year	5/11	Anita Soni	Provided comprehensive expenditure estimates of persons who died in a given year based on the MEPS data.
Office of Management and Budget	Employment-related insurance information	6/11	Steve Hill	Provided information on the analytic capacity of the MEPS to address issues related to employment-related health insurance coverage.
Government Accounting Office	Trends in the use of prescription pain relievers	7/11	Marie Stagnitti, Ed Miller, Steve Hill, and Steve Cohen	Provided consultations to address questions related to measuring trends of prescription pain reliever use.
Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, HHS	Estimates of persons gaining eligibility to Medicaid based on the ACA	7/11	Tom Selden	Provided MEPS-based microsimulation estimates in the areas of: (1) estimates of the number of persons who gained Medicaid eligibility under ACA solely due to the exclusion of non-taxable Social Security from the Modified Adjusted Gross Income (MAGI) definition of countable income; (2) estimates of the proportion of post-reform Medicaid eligibles who would have been eligible under pre-reform rules, and who are thus ineligible for the higher Federal Medical Assistance Percentage (FMAP); and (3) input to the ACA formula for replacing pre-reform income thresholds with MAGI-based standards while ensuring no net aggregate gain or loss of eligibility.

Requests for data and publications: Descriptive statistics for all assistance provided are available upon request. Please contact Cindy Nunley at cindy.nunley@ahrq.hhs.gov.

Note: HHS is the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; KIDSIM is an AHRQ microsimulation model focusing on children's coverage. ACA is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010.

Source: Center for Financing, Access, and Cost Trends, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

Current as of September 2011

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Internet Citation:

Informing Health Initiatives: Summary of Requests and Assistance Provided, April 2011-July 2011. Agency for Healthcare Research Quality, Rockville, MD. http://www.ahrq.gov/data/meps/ihisum0711.htm

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