Medical Disorders Series

This Note describes the contents of a data file on adult medical disorders from the Health Insurance Experiment (HIE), a major social experiment conducted by RAND Corporation from 1974 to 1982. The experiment assessed how variations in patients' share of health care costs, as determined by insurance plan, affected their use of health services, their satisfaction with care, the quality of their care, and the state of their health. A related purpose was to study how those outcomes were influenced by the mode of delivery, i.e., fee for service or health maintenance organization. This Note describes many of the measures used by the HIE to determine how different levels of insurance affected the health status of adults in the study. The file for adults contains 5,871 records, each representing an adult enrollee in the experiment. The variables documented in the Note are derived from raw data elicited at the beginning and end of the experiment. The information provided allows the user to trace the construction of each variable from the questions asked of participants. Each variable is described briefly and information on the distribution of values is summarized.