Health insurance coverage dataset

We will start by reading in a dataset which contains health care enrollment data over a period for several categories. This data has been sourced from Table HIB-2, health insurance coverage status and type of coverage all persons by age and sex: 1999 to 2012, and it is available from the CMS website at http://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/health-insurance/historical-series/hib.html.

This table shows the number of people covered by government and private insurance, as well as the number of people not covered.

This table has several embedded time series across all the 14 years represented. 14 data points would not be considered an extremely long time series; however, we will use this data to demonstrate how we can comb through many time series at once. Since it is small, it will be easy enough to verify the results via visual inspection and printing subsets of the data. As you become familiar with the methodology, it will enable you to expand to...