Publications by Timothy Triplett for Health Policy Center

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More about Timothy Triplett's areas of expertise can be found on this Urban Institute expert's page.

The Urban Institute, along with its subcontractor, International Communications Research, conducted the 2008 Massachusetts Health Insurance Survey (HIS) for the Massachusetts Division of Health Care Finance and Policy to obtain information on health insurance coverage and access to and use of health care for the non-institutionalized population in Massachusetts. This report provides information about the methods used to collect and analyze the 2008 HIS data.

Florida is among the first states to implement Medicaid reform using a competitive consumer choice model. Using data from a 2006-07 survey of Medicaid beneficiaries newly enrolled in Florida’s reform program, in an October volume of Health Affairs, Terri Coughlin, Sharon Long and Tim Triplett and colleagues examine how well Florida Medicaid beneficiaries understood the many changes taking place in Medicaid and their experiences in selecting a health plan. They found significant gaps in beneficiaries’ understanding of major components of the reform. Among others, about 30 percent were not aware they were enrolled in reform and more than half had trouble understanding plan information. Additionally, they found that these problems were not particular to any group but instead were experienced broadly across the full Medicaid population.

Researchers from the Urban Institute and the State of Massachusetts explored why existing surveys generate very different estimates of the uninsurance rate in Massachusetts. The surveys they examined are the Current Population Survey (CPS), the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), the Massachusetts Health Insurance Survey, and the Massachusetts Health Reform Survey (MHRS). This brief described how estimates may vary because of differences in the wording of the insurance questions asked in the surveys, differences in question placement and context within the survey, differences in survey design and fielding strategies, differences in accounting for missing data and other data preparation, and differences in survey fielding time frames. The analysis concludes that there has been no single survey in Massachusetts that is clearly superior across all of these important dimensions.

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