SAHIE provide information on health insurance coverage by age, sex, race, Hispanic origin, and income categories at the state level and by age, sex and income categories at the county level.
SAHIE are used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in support of its National Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program.
The SAHIE program publishes small area estimates for health insurance that incorporate age, race, sex, and Hispanic origin by income-to-poverty ratios.
The goal of the SAHIE program is to produce similar estimates for the low-income uninsured population.
The initial county-level heath insurance estimates by the SAHIE program partly met this need.
The SAHIE program constructs statistical models that relate health insurance coverage, as measured by survey estimates from the CPS ASEC, to population estimates and administrative records.
These data include the following: tax exemptions tabulated by age and income-to-poverty ratios, and a tax-to-income distribution and its variance (from the Internal Revenue Service 1040 Individual Master File aggregated before the data are released to SAHIE); the number of food stamp enrollees (from the Food and Nutrition Service); the number of Medicaid enrollees by age and sex (from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Medicaid Statistical Information System); and the number of SCHIP enrollees (from the SCHIP Annual Reports).
When the SAHIE program produces the next round of estimates, the revised data will be used.
By the release of the 2008 ACS (usually in August of the following survey year), the SAHIE program should be able to produce ACS-based county estimates for all counties while the ACS direct estimates will have estimates on counties that have populations 65,000 and over.