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The Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS) is a continuous, multipurpose survey of a nationally representative sample of the Medicare population, conducted by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). It collects data on demographics, health insurance, health status, health care expenditures, satisfaction with care, and access to care for Medicare beneficiaries. The MCBS provides a unique source of information regarding beneficiaries aged 65 and over and beneficiaries aged 64 and below with disabilities residing in the United States that cannot be obtained solely through CMS administrative sources. For researchers interested in issues of health care utilization and cost, CMS releases two Limited Data Set (LDS) files for each data year and a Public Use File (PUF) freely available for download and use. Also, special topic based PUFs have been released on the impact of COVID-19 on Medicare beneficiaries. This presentation will demonstrate the importance of the MCBS for research on the Medicare population, discuss how researchers can access the data, where researchers can find published MCBS estimates, what content areas have recently been added, such as food insecurity, limited English proficiency, and COVID-19 vaccination uptake and what new content is on the horizon. The presentation will also discuss the operational challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the content enhancement opportunities created by the public health emergency. It will conclude with a review of the suite of materials and documentation available for data users to enhance their research and utilize more timely data.

The industrialization of the deep sea is expanding world wide. Increasing oil and gas exploration activities in the absence of sufficient baseline data in deep-sea ecosystems has made environmental management challenging. Here, we review the types of activities that are associated with global offshore oil and gas development in water depths over 200 m, the typical impacts of these activities, some of the more extreme impacts of accidental oil and gas releases, and the current state of management in the major regions of offshore industrial activity including 18 exclusive economic zones. Direct impacts of infrastructure installation, including sediment resuspension and burial by seafloor anchors and pipelines, are typically restricted to a radius of ∼100 m on from the installation on the seafloor. Discharges of water-based and low toxicity oil based drilling muds and produced water can extend over 2 km, while the ecological impacts at the population and community levels on the sea floor are most commonly on the order of 200–300 m from their source. These impacts may persist in the deep sea for many years and likely longer for its more fragile ecosystems, such as cold-water corals. This synthesis of information provides the basis for a series of recommendations for the management of offshore oil and gas development. An effective management strategy, aimed at minimizing risk of significant environmental harm, will typically encompass regulations of the activity itself (e.g., discharge practices, materials used), combined with spatial (e.g., avoidance rules and marine protected areas), and temporal measures (e.g., restricted activities during peak reproductive periods). Spatial management measures that encompass representatives of all of the regional deep-sea community types is important in this context. Implementation of these management strategies should consider minimum buffer zones to displace industrial activity beyond the range of typical impacts: at least 2 km from any discharge points and surface infrastructure and 200 m from seafloor infrastructure with no expected discharges. Although managing natural resources is, arguably, more challenging in deep-water environments, inclusion of these proven conservation tools contributes to robust environmental management strategies for oil and gas extraction in the deep sea.