Office-Based Provider Visit Data. Editing and Imputation Expenditures for office-based provider visits were developed in a sequence of logical edits and imputations. “Household” edits were applied to sources and amounts of payment for all events reported by HC respondents. “MPC” edits were applied to provider-reported sources and amounts of payment for records matched to household-reported events. Both sets of edits were used to correct obvious errors (as described above) in the reporting of expenditures. After the data from each source were edited, a decision was made as to whether household- or MPC- reported information would be used in the final editing and in the predictive mean matching imputations for missing expenditures. The general rule was that MPC data would be used for events where a household-reported event corresponded to an MPC-reported event (i.e., a matched event), since providers usually have more complete and accurate data on sources and amounts of payment than households. One of the more important edits separated flat fee events from simple events. This edit was necessary because groups of events covered by a flat fee (i.e., a flat fee bundle) were edited and imputed separately from individual events covered by a single charge (i.e., simple events). (See Section 2.5.5 for more details on flat fee groups). Logical edits also were used to sort each event into a specific category for the imputations. Events with complete expenditures were flagged as potential donors while events with missing expenditure data were assigned to various recipient categories. Each event with missing expenditure data was assigned to a recipient category based on the extent of its missing charge and expenditure data. For example, an event with a known total charge but no expenditure information was assigned to one category, while an event with a known total charge and partial expenditure information was assigned to a different category. Similarly, events without a known total charge and no or partial expenditure information were assigned to various recipient categories. The logical edits produced eight recipient categories in which all events had a common extent of missing data. Separate imputations were performed on events in each recipient category. For office-based events, the donor pool was restricted to events with complete expenditures from the MPC. The donor pool included “free events” because, in some instances, providers are not paid for their services. These events represent charity car...
