What Do We Know About Early ACA Impacts? Assessing the Evidence from Non-traditional Data Sources
Although there will be a high demand for information on the effects of the Affordable Care Act’s coverage expansions as they roll out in January 2014, early information will be difficult to obtain. Longstanding, well-established national surveys (such as the American Community Survey, the National Health Interview Survey, and the Current Population Survey), while critical for longer term evaluations, cannot provide rapid feedback given the time lags in the availability of those data. This means that there will be little information on the ACA’s effects based on these sources in 2014. This session will provide estimates of health insurance coverage changes in early 2014 from three non-traditional data sources for policymakers and researchers: The Gallup daily tracking poll, pharmacy claims data, and the Health Reform Monitoring Survey, a quarterly internet survey. Each of these sources has different strengths and weakness but all three will have information available in time for the ASHE conference on how health insurance coverage was changing in the first quarter of 2014 relative to the 2013 baseline, nationally and for subgroups of states that have adopted different approaches for implementing the ACA. By comparing methodologies and findings from these three complementary data sources, it will be possible to assess the degree of agreement on the estimates of the extent and nature of the coverage changes that are occurring at a time of major change in both public and private health insurance markets, and to assess the value of these non-traditional data sources as early monitoring systems.