This brief contains information for the states on the addition of the uninsurance verification question to the Current Population Survey (CPS). The CPS estimates of state uninsurance rates will be adjusted based on the new verification question. August 2001.

Survey estimates of public health insurance program enrollment tend to be lower than those compiled from administrative enrollment data for those same programs, a discordance which is particularly apparent for Medicaid. The crude Medicaid undercount in the Current Population Survey’s Annual Social and Economic Supplement (CPS), the most prominently used survey for policy research that measures health insurance coverage, was 32 percent in both 2000 and 2001. Given the important uses of the CPS data, improved understanding of the undercount in the CPS is crucial. This paper presents parameters from two logistic regression models. These parameters can be used to predict the probability that the Medicaid administrative data imply that a CPS sample member actually had Medicaid. Originally published October 2007; revised with a minor code revision for Model 2 in November 2008 (revisions are reflected in the attachments).

The second download available on this page is a text file with the Stata code for this adjustment.

This document provides a description of the date processing error in the Current Population Survey that less to a misreporting of insurance coverage and the adjustment solution. In a small percentage of cases, some residents in a household were tabulated as "not covered" by insurance when they had in fact reported private or group coverage. This finding led to the Census Bureau’s recent downward revision of the number of uninsured from 15.9 to 15.3 percent or about 1.8 million fewer uninsured people in the U.S. in 2005. April 2007.

This document briefly summarizes the changes to the health insurance questions and fields on the CPS surveys and files for survey years 1989 - 2005, and includes a table that contains the fields that can be used to determine if a person had any health insurance coverage. March 2006.

Highlights from SHADAC's August 29, 2007, conference call discussing the health insurance coverage estimates from the 2006 Current Population Survey data release. September 2007.