Confirming insurance coverage in a telephone survey: Evidence from the National Survey of America's Families

Until recently, most surveys of insurance coverage have classified people a s uninsured if they have not been assigned some coverage in response to one of a series of questions about specific types of insurance. This "residual " approach to measuring uninsurance rates has not required respondents to e ither verify their insurance status or confirm that they are uninsured. Usi ng the 1997 National Survey of America's Families, this paper examines the impact of a question confirming whether individuals for whom no insurance c overage is reported are, in fact, uninsured. The results of our analysis su ggest that a confirmation question as part of a telephone-based survey work s to lower estimates of the uninsured.