CREAT: Census Research Exploration and Analysis Tool

Papers written by Author(s): 'G. Edward Miller'

The following papers contain search terms that you selected. From the papers listed below, you can navigate to the PDF, the profile page for that working paper, or see all the working papers written by an author. You can also explore tags, keywords, and authors that occur frequently within these papers.
Click here to search again

Frequently Occurring Concepts within this Search

Viewing papers 1 through 4 of 4


  • Working Paper

    The Underserved Have Less Access to Employer-Sponsored Telemedicine Coverage

    September 2022

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-22-40

    Telemedicine has been proposed as one means of improving health care access for underserved communities, and information about insurance coverage for telemedicine (TMC) is important in understanding its utilization and provision. We use 2018-2019 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey-Insurance Component data on employer-sponsored coverage to examine pre-pandemic TMC relative to employer, worker, and health plan characteristics. We find that the share of employees in private sector establishments offering TMC was lower in the most rural counties, in smaller firms, in establishments without unionized employees, and in establishments where most workers were low wage, part-time and older when compared to other establishments. These findings reflect differences across establishments in insurance offers, as well as differences in TMC conditional on an insurance offer, which suggests that TMC may function as a premium plan feature with limited availability and potential support for improving healthcare access for the underserved.
    View Full Paper PDF
  • Working Paper

    Introducing the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey-Insurance Component with Administrative Records (MEPS-ICAR): Description, Data Construction Methodology, and Quality Assessment

    August 2022

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-22-29

    This report introduces a new dataset, the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey-Insurance Component with Administrative Records (MEPS-ICAR), consisting of MEPS-IC survey data on establishments and their health insurance benefits packages linked to Decennial Census data and administrative tax records on MEPS-IC establishments' workforces. These data include new measures of the characteristics of MEPS-IC establishments' parent firms, employee turnover, the full distribution of MEPS-IC workers' personal and family incomes, the geographic locations where those workers live, and improved workforce demographic detail. Next, this report details the methods used for producing the MEPS-ICAR. Broadly, the linking process begins by matching establishments' parent firms to their workforces using identifiers appearing in tax records. The linking process concludes by matching establishments to their own workforces by identifying the subset of their parent firm's workforce that best matches the expected size, total payroll, and residential geographic distribution of the establishment's workforce. Finally, this report presents statistics characterizing the match rate and the MEPS-ICAR data itself. Key results include that match rates are consistently high (exceeding 90%) across nearly all data subgroups and that the matched data exhibit a reasonable distribution of employment, payroll, and worker commute distances relative to expectations and external benchmarks. Notably, employment measures derived from tax records, but not used in the match itself, correspond with high fidelity to the employment levels that establishments report in the MEPS-IC. Cumulatively, the construction of the MEPS-ICAR significantly expands the capabilities of the MEPS-IC and presents many opportunities for analysts.
    View Full Paper PDF
  • Working Paper

    Estimating the Costs of Covering Dependents through Employer-Sponsored Plans

    January 2017

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-17-48

    Several health reform microsimulation models use synthetic firms to estimate how changes in federal and state policies will affect employers' offers of health insurance, as well as the price of health insurance for workers and firms. These models typically rely on distinct measures of the average costs of single and dependent coverage, for employees and employers, which do not capture the joint distribution of these costs. Since some firms pay a large share of the premium for single polices but a lower share for dependent coverage, or the reverse, simulation models that do not account for the joint distribution of premium costs may not be sufficient to answer certain policy questions. To address this issue, we developed a method to extract estimates of the joint distribution of employer and employee costs of health insurance coverage from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey ' Insurance Component (MEPS-IC). This paper describes how these distributions were constructed and how they were incorporated into the Urban Institute's Health Insurance Policy Simulation Model (HIPSM). The estimates presented in this paper and those available in supplementary datasets may be useful for other simulation models that need to utilize information on the joint distribution of single and dependent employee premium contributions.
    View Full Paper PDF
  • Working Paper

    Employer-Sim Microsimulation Model: Model Development and Application to Estimation of Tax Subsidies to Health Insurance

    December 2014

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-14-46

    Employment-related health coverage is the predominant form of health insurance in the nonelderly, US population. Developing sound policies regarding the tax treatment of employer-sponsored insurance requires detailed information on the insurance benefits offered by employers as well as detailed information on the characteristics of employees and their familes. Unfortunately, no nationally representative data set contains all of the necessary elements. This paper describes the development of the Employer-Sim model which models tax-based health policies by using data on workers from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey Household Component (MEPS HC) to form synthetic workforces for each establishment in the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey Insurance Component (MEPS IC). This paper describes the application of Employer-Sim to estimating tax subsidies to employer-sponsored health insurance and presents estimates of the cost and indcidence of the subsidy for 2008. The paper concludes by discussing other potential applications of the Employer-Sim model.
    View Full Paper PDF