Information was collected on up four plans per family until 2019; however data are only publicly available for plans one and two. Users may want to see HIP2DENTAL (Plan 2 has dental coverage) and the IPUMS NHIS recoded variable HIPDENTCOVR, which indicates whether either plan covered prescription drugs.

Persons with three or more plans have a "yes" response to the HIPRIVGT2 variable (available for 2004-2018). A very small number of persons have more than two private insurance plans. Additional information for the third and fourth plans for a person is available through a Data Research Center. See the Survey Description document available on the NCHS website for more information.

HIP1DENTAL is part of a series of follow-up questions for individuals who indicated they had private health insurance. The frequencies provided in HIP1DENTAL reflect responses which have been edited based on plan names. Users are strongly encouraged to refer to HIPRIVATEE for more information on the editing process and the definition of private health insurance.

Not all persons were accurate in reporting what type of health insurance they had. This might be shown, for example, by a mismatch between the type of insurance coverage the person selected (when handed a card listing various types) and the verbatim name of the insurance plan. For this reason, the NCHS edited the responses to reassign persons to the correct type of insurance coverage.