Medicare Current Beneficiaries Survey

Description:

The Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS), sponsored by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Office of Enterprise Data and Analytics (OEDA) through a contract with NORC at the University of Chicago is a continuous, in-person, longitudinal survey of a representative national sample of the Medicare population. It has been carried out continuously for more than 30 years, encompassing more than one million total interviews. The MCBS is designed to aid CMS in administering, monitoring, and evaluating Medicare programs, is the leading source of information on Medicare and its impact on beneficiaries, provides important information on Medicare beneficiaries that is NOT available in CMS administrative data and plays an essential role in monitoring and examining health care access, utilization, and care transition and coordination.

The central goals of the MCBS are to determine expenditures and sources of payment for all services used by Medicare beneficiaries, including co-payments, deductibles, and non-covered services; to ascertain all types of health insurance coverage and relate coverage to sources of payment; and to trace outcomes over time, such as changes in health status and spending down to Medicaid eligibility and the impacts of Medicare program changes on satisfaction with care and usual source of care.

Coverage: National

Description of Cohort:Nationally representative sample of Medicare beneficiaries