MCBS - sporedata/researchdesigneR GitHub Wiki
General description
The MCBS collects important data on Medicare beneficiaries that isn't available through operational or administrative data from the Medicare program, and it's used to monitor and evaluate beneficiaries' health and health-care policies. The MCBS gathers comprehensive data on beneficiaries' health insurance coverage, health care utilization and costs, access to treatment, and satisfaction with care, as well as data on specific subjects such as drug coverage, Medicare program knowledge, and housing factors.
Variable categories
-
The MCBS Public Use File (PUF) is a subset of the MCBS data that focuses on the health and well-being of beneficiaries. As a consequence of the file's disclosure safeguards, such as de-identification and other techniques, the MCBS PUF does not require a Data Use Agreement. The purpose of this statistics is to aid study on the Medicare program.
- Data integrity and potential limitations
- User agreement details
- Privacy protection
-
The Limited Data Set Files (LDS) include health information on beneficiaries (without any direct identifiers, as defined by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA Privacy Rule)). The LDS contains Medicare claims, as well as information on beneficiary characteristics and enrollment, in the usual analytical files.
- The Data Use agreement
- Related files
Limitations
-
The "always enrolled," or elderly and handicapped Medicare beneficiaries who are eligible to Medicare for the whole calendar year, are represented in the Access-to-Care files. This idea of enrollment eliminates those who join Medicare during the year. It also eliminates the majority of those who died throughout the year. Medical expenditures for this group are much greater on average than for surviving recipients.
-
Another drawback of the Access-to-Care PUFs is that they do not include survey-reported health-care utilization and expenses. Use and payments for Medicare-covered services are included in the files, as are Medicare billing data. Medicare, on the other hand, only pays about half of overall health-care costs for the elderly. Outpatient prescription medicines and long-term facility care are two of the more financially significant health care services not covered by Medicare and hence not included in the Access-to-Care files.
Related publications
- Zostavax vaccine effectiveness among US elderly using real-world evidence: Addressing unmeasured confounders by using multiple imputation after linking beneficiary surveys with Medicare claims.
- Methodological issues in using multiple years of the Medicare current beneficiary survey.
- A cardiovascular disease risk prediction algorithm for use with the Medicare current beneficiary survey.
- Using the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey to conduct research on Medicare-eligible veterans.
- Measuring Frailty in Medicare Data: Development and Validation of a Claims-Based Frailty Index.
Data Access
Access to all files requires registration and sensitive and restricted files require an additional application.