Health Status and Attitudes Towards Health in Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) Sample Population

BACKGROUND: Studies have shown that lack of health insurance is associated with important clinical characteristics, including using fewer health care services, delaying seeking medical care and forgoing necessary care for potentially serious symptoms. OBJECTIVE: To examine associations between health status and attitude about health in sample Medical Expenditure Panel Survey population (MEPS). DESIGN: The Household Component (HC) public use file from the 2005 MEPS data, a nationally representative survey of the noninstitutionalized US population was used. Health attitudes and health status were measured using the Self-Administered Questionnaire (SAQ) data collected within MEPS. ANALYSIS: Data were analyzed using SAS® 9.1.3. Descriptive statistics were obtained using PROC UNIVARIATE. PROC CANCORR in SAS® was used to measure canonical correlation between set of attitude about health variables and set of health status variables. RESULTS: The mean age of sample population was 46.33 years (Standard deviation: 17.69). Majority of them were female 60.6% and white 77.2%. The first canonical correlation was 0.32 (11% overlapping variance); the second was 0.08 (0.6% overlapping variance). All four pairs of canonical variates accounted for the significant relationships between the two sets of variables. Canonical Redundancy Analysis obtained using PROC CANCORR in SAS® found first health status variate accounting 4% of the variance in the attitude about health variable set. CONCLUSION: Persons health status and their attitude about health are moderately related. Further studies need to be conducted with more measures of attitude about health to determine exact relationship between health status and attitude about health.