Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS) (CMS-P-0015A)

The Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS) is a continuous, multipurpose survey of a nationally representative sample of aged, disabled, and institutionalized Medicare beneficiaries. MCBS, which is sponsored by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), is the only comprehensive source of information on the health status, health care use and expenditures, health insurance coverage, and socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of the entire spectrum of Medicare beneficiaries. The purpose of this revision is to seek approval for CMS to add new items on sleep apnea, thyroid disease, and bowel disease, remove content that is no longer relevant to the goals of the survey, and update existing content to better meet the policy needs of CMS and stakeholders. To ensure the sustainability of the survey and to maintain a reasonable level of respondent burden, it is necessary to routinely review MCBS survey content and remove items that are no longer as relevant to the policy landscape or which are no longer performing well. The requested deletions are a result of a content reduction process that CMS developed in 2024 and is currently using to review MCBS survey content in the Community and Facility instruments. The goals of this process are three-fold: 1) to promote efficiency by streamlining the questionnaire and reducing respondent burden; 2) to continuously assess utility of information collected by the MCBS and remove questions that are no longer relevant, and 3) to maintain the production of high-quality data by removing content that is no longer performing well. For this full clearance revision, CMS has used the content reduction process to identify items that a) are low performing due to difficulty of administration or data quality issues, b) are no longer needed at the same frequency of administration, c) require updated question text or response options, or d) no longer match the existing healthcare landscape or require further evaluation.

The latest form for Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS) (CMS-P-0015A) expires 2029-01-31 and can be found here.