Review of Existing Data Sources to Assess the Impacts of the Affordable Care Act Medicaid Expansions: Working Paper
This working paper was prepared by SHADAC Deputy Director Julie Sonier for the Assistant Secretary of Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The purpose of the report is to describe and assess existing data sources that could be used to evaluate the impacts of the Affordable Care Act on Medicaid-eligible populations and health care providers. The report identifies key outcomes of interest for evaluating the impacts of the ACA on these two groups, the available data sources that can be used to assess these outcomes, and the gaps in the available data.
In all, the report examines eight national population surveys, seven provider surveys, and four sources of administrative data from providers. For each of these sources, the report indicates how the data are collected and from whom; how complete or representative the data are for the populations of interest; and what level of geography is available for analysis.
Publication
Prospective Benefit Design for the Medicaid Expansion Population: The Predictive Capacity of Self-Reported Health Measures
State Medicaid programs are preparing to absorb a projected 16 million new enrollees in 2014, most of whom are low-income childless adults about whose health care needs relatively little is known. Without information on prior medical history for the expansion population, states are unable to design and implement innovative and effective benefit design targeting this group.
Given these circumstances, self-reported health measures collected at the time of enrollment are likely to be the only practical means of gathering data for programmatic use. Dr. Lindsey Leininger, Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Administration at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is leading a SHARE-funded project to assess Wisconsin’s pioneering use of this strategy to inform program design for childless adults enrolling in its Medicaid program, which was expanded via waiver to cover this population in 2009.
In this webinar, Dr. Leininger presents findings from this analysis of Wisconsin's experience. She augments these findings with a nationally representative analysis of a sample of childless adults drawn from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS). Dr. Leininger’s Wisconsin analysis provides evidence gathered “in the field,” and the MEPS analysis provides both a nationwide benchmark and an assessment of the predictive capacity of a wide range of self-reported health measures—including but not limited to those used by Wisconsin.