Deciphering Medicaid data: issues and needs.

The wide range of data bases that can be used for Medicaid analyses and research are reviewed in this article. The Health Care Financing Administration, State Medicaid agencies, and other groups have developed useful data bases and made them available to the public. Efforts could be made to obtain better quality national data, including annual reports on State participation, expenditures and program characteristics, and person-based data bases about Medicaid clients and services. State-level analyses and research could be enhanced and disseminated more widely. More complex data collection and analysis efforts are an inevitable tradeoff for the flexibility of the Federal-State structure of Medicaid.