IPUMS Health Surveys: Medical Expenditure Panel Survey: Version 3.0

IPUMS MEPS is an NICHD-funded project designed to make Medical Expenditure Panel Survey Household Component (MEPS-HC) data easier for researchers to use. MEPS-HC is an ongoing panel survey, started in 1996, that is produced by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). Annually, MEPS-HC collects information on roughly 30,000 people living in 12,000 households. IPUMS MEPS contains data and documentation for nearly 2,000 annual person-level variables from the 1996-present full-year consolidated files. These variables are consistently named and coded over time within MEPS, and where possible, they are named and coded consistently with comparable variables from the National Health Interview Survey. IPUMS MEPS also includes technical documentation on topics such as sample sizes, appropriate variance estimation in analyses of MEPS data, and explanations of expenditure data collection and definition in MEPS. Version D071.V2.2 of IPUMS MEPS was skipped due to production delays related to changes made to accommodate the 2020 extended MEPS panel.