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The American Community Survey (ACS) is an important source of estimates of health insurance coverage in the United States. The ACS allows respondents to report their health insurance coverage through a series of “Yes”/“No” questions and a write-in field for “other” health insurance information. Respondents may choose to use the write-in field for a variety of reasons, including if they do not know how to classify their health insurance coverage type or if they want to provide additional information about coverage already reported. Previous research suggests that the write-in field contributes to an overestimation of direct-purchase coverage and multiple types of concurrent coverage in the ACS (Mach & O’Hara 2011; Lynch & Kenney, 2011). Yet these analyses occurred before changes to the health insurance landscape that may have affected respondents’ reporting habits. In this paper, we examine the use of write-ins in the ACS. We focus on the demographic predictors of write-in use and consider the relationship between write-in use and health insurance coverage. Results provide additional information on how respondents report their health insurance coverage in surveys.
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