163 – Monitoring the Early Effects of the Affordable Care Act Using National Center for Health Statistics Data
Using the National Health Interview Survey to Monitor the Early Effects of the Affordable Care Act
Jane F. Gentleman
National Center for Health Statistics
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) was signed into law in March 2010. It puts in place comprehensive health insurance reforms that will roll out over four years and beyond, with most changes taking place by 2014. Some changes have already begun. This paper describes how the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), which is conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), is being used to monitor the population's health status, health insurance coverage, health care access, and health care utilization, which are all potentially affected by the ACA. The NHIS, which has been in the field since 1957, was already equipped with many relevant questions to yield data for that purpose. In addition, about 86 new specialized questions explicitly designed to yield enhanced information about changes potentially associated with the implementation of the ACA were added to the NHIS starting in 2010. Also, the NHIS sample size was increased starting in 2011 to enhance the precision of state-level estimates, which are important for monitoring changes in the health care system. Continued timely release of NHIS public use data will enable the public to perform its own analyses of the rich multivariate NHIS data.
