MEPS Reconciliation

Reconciling Health Care Expenditures in the National Health Expenditure Accounts and in the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey

• In this study, we compare and align health care expenditure estimates from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) and the National Health Expenditure Accounts (NHEA).  Reconciling MEPS and NHEA estimates serves two important purposes.   First, it is an important quality assurance exercise for improving and ensuring the integrity of each source's estimates.  Second, the reconciliation provides a consistent baseline of health expenditure data for policy simulations. We make adjustments to account for the differences in underlying populations, covered services and other measurement concepts to reconcile the NHEA with MEPS, we then compare and discuss potential reasons for the differences between the health care spending estimates.  We also look at how the differences between MEPS and NHEA have changed since the previous reconciliations.