DOI: 10.3886/icpsr36842
title: Health Reform Monitoring Survey, United States, Third Quarter 2016
title: Archival Version

description: In January 2013, the Urban Institute launched the Health Reform Monitoring Survey (HRMS), a survey of the nonelderly population, to explore the value of cutting-edge, Internet-based survey methods to monitor the Affordable Care Act (ACA) before data from federal government surveys are available. Topics covered by the 12th round of the survey (third quarter 2016) include self-reported health status, type of health insurance coverage, access to and use of health care, out-of-pocket health care costs, health care affordability, health insurance literacy, feelings of unfair treatment by doctors and other health care providers, experience with health insurance marketplaces, awareness of ACA provisions, and rating of neighborhood characteristics. Demographic information collected by the survey includes age, gender, sexual orientation, marital status, education, race, Hispanic origin, United States citizenship, housing type, home ownership, internet access, income, employment status, employer size, body mass index, and whether the respondent reported an ambulatory care sensitive condition or a mental or behavioral condition.
description: The survey provides information on health insurance
coverage, access to and use of health care, health care affordability, and self-reported health
status, as well as timely data on important implementation issues under the ACA.
description: The HRMS provides data on health insurance coverage, access to and use of health care, health care affordability, and self-reported health status. Beginning in the second quarter of 2013, each round of the HRMS also contains topical questions focusing on timely ACA policy issues. In the first quarter of 2015, the HRMS shifted from a quarterly fielding schedule to a semiannual schedule.
description: The variables include original survey questions, household demographic profile data, and constructed variables which can be used to link panel members who participated in multiple rounds.
description: The HRMS weights reflect the probability of sample selection from the KnowledgePanel and post-stratification to the characteristics of nonelderly adults in the United States based on benchmarks from the Current Population Survey, American Community Survey, and Pew Hispanic Center Survey. Variables used in the post-stratification weighting of the KnowledgePanel and the post stratification weighting of the HRMS include sex, age, race and ethnicity, primary language, education, presence of children in households, household income, family income as a percentage of FPL, homeownership status, internet access, urban or rural status, state group, and census region.


In January 2017, all rounds of the HRMS were reweighted due to a change in the Current Population Survey question on Internet access that was being used to create benchmarks for the construction of the post stratification weights. The new weight variable is included in the data file together with the old weight variable.
description: Response Rates: The HRMS response rate is roughly five percent each round.
description: For each HRMS round a stratified random sample of adults ages 18-64 is drawn from the KnowledgePanel, a probability-based, nationally represented Internet panel maintained by GfK Custom Research. The approximately 55,000 adults in the panel include households with and without Internet access. Panel members are recruited from an address-based sample frame derived from the United States Postal Service Delivery Sequence File, which covers 97 percent of United States households. The HRMS sample includes a random sample of approximately 7,500 nonelderly adults per quarter, including oversamples of adults with family incomes at or below 138 percent of the federal poverty line. Additional funders have supported oversamples of adults from individual states or subgroups of interest. However, the data file only includes data for adults in the general national sample and the income oversample.

Beginning in the first quarter of 2015, the HRMS shifted from a quarterly fielding schedule to a semiannual schedule.
description: Datasets: 
DS0: Study-Level Files
DS1: Public-Use Data
DS2: Restricted-Use Data
description: Household population aged 18-64.
description: web-based surveyThe principal investigators did not provide some of the variables collected in the twelfth round, such as the open-ended textual response variables (e.g., the variable for Question Q8b) and some variables from the KnowledgePanel profile questionnaire.In order to protect respondent anonymity and
prevent disclosure risk, ICPSR has recoded the following variables in the public use data:
PPREG4: All values were recoded to missing
Q15A: Values were top coded to 15,000
Q16A: Values were top coded to 20,000More information about this survey is available on the HRMS website.Demographic variables are provided by the KnowledgePanel.