Wow, I was way overthinking this. Thank you!  ... View more

Thank you for your reply ballardw, I agree it is curious as to why they didn't include the strata or cluster elements, although the paragraph below output 2 does acknowledge their importance for calculation accuracy.   The documentation of the data set describes the sampling as follows: The universe is separated into strata. Strata are determined upon 5 variables. Multiple individual clusters belong within each strata. Each cluster represents a hospital. Sampling of data from each cluster is based on "a probability sample of all clusters within a frame, with sampling probabilities proportional to the number of clusters in each stratum".   My REPEATED statement is structured such that each cluster [Hosp_nis] is nested within each stratum [Nis_stratum], which although I may certainly be incorrect, is structured suitably to account for this sampling design.      ... View more

Thank you! This was exactly the issue. A line of data was provided in the source data for "overall" which used a value of "." under Age_Adjusted_Rate. This caused SAS to recognize that variable type as character rather than number. Deleting this line of data fixed my issue.   ... View more

SAS has added a distribution that it nicer to code for things like dice rolls roll = rand('integer',1,6); Returns integer values with equal probability, i.e. 6-sided die above. ... View more