Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS) COVID-19 Rapid Response Supplement (CMS-P-0015A)

CMS has determined that asking a short series of COVID-19 related questions as a supplement to the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey is essential to CMS’ emergency response to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, self-reported data from beneficiaries who participate on the MCBS will provide unique and critical COVID-19 measures that are not available in CMS administrative data. For example, CMS has provided valuable aggregate data from Medicare Fee-for-Service claims data, Medicare Advantage encounter data, and Medicare enrollment information3. Self-reported data obtained through the MCBS COVID-19 Supplement will provide additional measures that can be provided only by interviewing Medicare beneficiaries. MCBS respondents, by definition, are most at risk for underlying conditions that may lead to more severe COVID-19 complications. Since the MCBS is a nationally representative sample of all Medicare beneficiaries, CMS has determined that a MCBS Fall COVID-19 Supplement is a unique vehicle to further assess and understand the COVID-19 pandemic. Implementing the MCBS Fall COVID-19 Supplement no later than October 2020 will allow for data to begin to be released to the public by December 2020. Because the survey must remain in the field for multiple weeks to complete data collection, launching the survey later than the beginning of October is not feasible to provide data by the end of the year. Data collection for the Fall COVID-19 Supplement to be administered by phone of all MCBS survey respondents will begin October 5, 2020 for a 5 week period. Once data collection is completed, approximately 5 weeks is needed for data processing, data review, quality control, weighting and development of preliminary estimates which will be released to the public by mid-December. This will be followed by data releases in 2021 as part of the MCBS 2019 Survey File Limited Data Set. Access to disclosure protected data is also planned through a special stand-alone 2019 MCBS COVID Public Use File in order to provide the data in the most expeditious manner to data users both internal to and external to CMS.

The latest form for Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS) COVID-19 Rapid Response Supplement (CMS-P-0015A) expires 2021-02-28 and can be found here.