In the 2014 SIPP Panel, infants, defined as household members less than one year old at the time of the interview, do not receive proxy interviews.  This change does not affect most topics in the SIPP.  However, for the Health Care Utilization and Medical Expenditure section, infants are considered a separate entity with unique health care needs, since they have unusually high medical utilization and expenditures compared to other groups.  Due to these large differences between infants and the rest of the population, we do not impute health care utilization and medical expenditure information for those who are less than one year old at the time of interview.  Values for these variables will be set to not in universe except for the two exceptions described below.

1.  The question for the amount paid out-of-pocket for household insurance premiums coverage  indirectly collects information on infants.   This question is asked of all individuals over age 15, and responses include premiums for policies that cover infants. This affects the household-level variable THIPAY, which provides information on how much was paid for health insurance premiums.

2.  For the variable EHLTSTAT, we  impute values for infants. This variable collects self-reported (or proxy reported) health status.  We impute values for this variable because we do not have any reason to believe that reported health status of infants is fundamentally different from that of other young children.