Abstract:
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The Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS) is a continuous, multipurpose survey of a nationally representative sample of the Medicare population, conducted by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) through a contract with NORC at the University of Chicago. The survey was designed to aid in administering, monitoring, and evaluating the Medicare program. In 2015, two new improvements were made to the sample design of MCBS. This paper reports on the expansion of the annual sampling frame to include all persons who will become eligible for Medicare by December 31 of the selection year, thus permitting the release of data products up to a year earlier than in the past. In addition we report on the results of an annual oversample of Hispanic beneficiaries taken for the first time in 2015, and on current plans for an oversample of Asian beneficiaries to be taken for the first time in 2016. We discuss the outcomes of these design innovations and their likely impacts on the survey data to be released for 2015 and future years.
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