The Health Reform Monitoring Survey, or HRMS, is a survey of the nonelderly that began in 2013. It is designed to provide timely information on implementation issues under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and changes in health insurance coverage and related health outcomes. The HRMS relies on GfK’s KnowledgePanel® to assess ACA implementation and identify trends in key outcomes related to the ACA. The HRMS provides data on health insurance coverage, access to and use of health care, health care affordability, and self-reported health status. Beginning in the second quarter of 2013, each round of the HRMS also contains topical questions focusing on timely ACA policy issues. In the first quarter of 2015, the HRMS shifted from a quarterly fielding schedule to a semiannual schedule.
For each round in which the survey is conducted, we make the survey instruments for the HRMS publicly available on this webpage roughly at the same time that we release new research products that use data from that survey round. In addition, with the support of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), the Urban Institute is partnering with the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan to make HRMS data available for public use through RWJF’s Health and Medical Archive on the ICPSR website nine months after each survey is fielded. The public use files contain data for the HRMS samples of approximately 7,500 adults, ages 18 to 64, derived from responses to the core and topical module questions in each round of the survey (the HRMS sample was expanded to 9,500 adults beginning in quarter 1 2017). We provide documentation to assist users of the data. The data are de-identified, and some variables in each dataset have been excluded or modified to protect the confidentiality of survey respondents.