Coverage expansion and the demand for health services: New data sources for measuring access
This session will feature various new data sources that can be used to measure the impact of the Affordable Care Act on access to care. The first paper describes a new quarterly household survey, the Health Reform Monitoring Survey, that provides national and some state level data on coverage by type, access, and affordability. The second describes a unique provider survey that uses an audit methodology to measure new appointment availability and time to appointment by payer type for ten states. The third describes a new data set based on quarterly discharge data from over 500 hospitals in about 30 states that provides trends in utilization by payer for all discharges as well as several that are considered sensitive to insurance status. All of these data sources are funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation as part of an overall effort to monitor the impact of the ACA on coverage, utilization, and affordability of care.