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Abstract:
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After more than a decade of research and testing, the Census Bureau redesigned questions on health insurance coverage in the Current Population Survey. This new set of questions expands the scope of the health insurance coverage, improves question understanding and lessens respondent burden, and provides a strong new baseline for measuring health insurance coverage. The redesigned questions differ from the old questionnaire in three ways: reference period, coverage types, and household-level design. This question begins the conversation about health insurance and improves responses to questions about health insurance coverage in the previous calendar year. It also starts with general coverage questions and drills down to specific types of coverage via different paths depending on previous answers. From these redesigned questions, we are able to get better measures of health insurance coverage and to enhance our understanding of health insurance churn and receipt over the course of the year. We discuss the complexity of the new survey instrument, the intricacies of health insurance measurement, and the challenge of designing the questionnaire and its new processing system.
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