Health and Health Care of the Medicated Population. Data from the 1996 MedicareCurrent Beneficiary Survey

摘要

The report is the fifth in a series of Medicare beneficiary sourcebooks. Theinformation presented here is drawn from the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS), a rotating panel survey of a nationally representative sample of aged and disabled Medicare beneficiaries. The MCBS is sponsored by the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA), under the general direction of its Office of Strategic Planning. Westat, a survey research organization with offices in Rockville, Maryland, is collecting and disseminating data for the first 10 years of the survey. The MCBS is a comprehensive source of information on the health status, health care service use and expenditures, health insurance coverage, and socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of aged and disabled Medicare beneficiaries. Survey data are collected three times each year over 4 years regardless of whether the beneficiary lives in a household or a long-term care facility. The resulting data are disseminated in annual public use files (PUFs) containing a cross-section of all persons entitled to Medicare during the year. The 1996 MCBS, for example, includes beneficiaries who were entitled to Medicare for all or part of the year, as well as beneficiaries who died in 1996. These data can be used for cross-sectional analyses, or linked to PUFs from previous years for longitudinal analyses of the Medicare population.