Improvements in Uninsurance Estimates for Fully Imputed Cases in the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement

In 2019, the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement introduced updates to data processing, including to the imputation of health insurance for cases with no reported health insurance information. This article examines the impact on health insurance estimates of modernized imputation procedures that were part of a redesign of the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement. We use descriptive analysis and multinomial logistic regression to examine whether imputation biases estimates of health insurance coverage using data from the 2017 Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement, which used legacy methods, and the 2017 Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement Research File, which debuted the processing redesign. We find that cases with all of their health insurance information imputed using legacy methods were more likely to be uninsured or to be covered by multiple insurance types after adjusting for factors associated with having missing data. With the processing updates, fully imputed cases do not differ from other cases in their likelihood of being uninsured, having private coverage, having public coverage, or in having private and public coverage. Processing updates in the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement improved data quality by increasing the percent of people with any health insurance coverage and decreasing the percent of people with multiple types of coverage, especially among fully imputed cases.