9 research outputs found
Employer Health Insurance Mandates and the Risk of Unemployment
Employer health insurance mandates form the basis of many health care reform proposals. Proponents make the case that they will increase insurance, while opponents raise the concern that low-wage workers will see offsetting reductions in their wages and that in the presence of minimum wage laws some of the lowest wage workers will become unemployed. We construct an estimate of the number of workers whose wages are so close to the minimum wage that they cannot be lowered to absorb the cost of health insurance, using detailed data on wages, health insurance, and demographics from the Current Population Survey (CPS). We find that 33 percent of uninsured workers earn within $3 of the minimum wage, putting them at risk of unemployment if their employers were required to offer insurance. Assuming an elasticity of employment with respect to minimum wage increase of -0.10, we estimate that 0.2 percent of all full-time workers and 1.4 percent of uninsured full-time workers would lose their jobs because of a health insurance mandate. Workers who would lose their jobs are disproportionately likely to be high school dropouts, minority, and female. This risk of unemployment should be a crucial component in the evaluation of both the effectiveness and distributional implications of these policies relative to alternatives such as tax credits, Medicaid expansions, and individual mandates, and their broader effects on the well-being of low-wage workers.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/73099/1/j.1540-6296.2008.00133.x.pd
Managed health care plans in Southern United States municipalities: empirical evidence on choice of plan
Money and Mandates: Relative Effects of Key Policy Levers in Expanding Health Insurance Coverage to All Americans
Declines in Employer-Sponsored Insurance between 2000 and 2008: Examining the Components of Coverage by Firm Size
Health Insurance Take-up by the Near-Elderly
This study examines the effect of price on the decision by older workers and early retirees to take up health insurance for which they are eligible. The analysis is based on administrative data from a medium sized employer and takes advantage of a natural experiment created by the firmâs health insurance contribution policy. For retirees, the amount the firm contributes toward coverage depends on when a person retired and her years of service at that date. As a result of this policy, there is considerable variation in out-of-pocket premiums faced by individuals in the data, but this variation is independent of the non-price attributes of the health insurance plans offered, and plausibly exogenous to worker characteristics that are likely to affect the demand for insurance. We find that price has a statistically significant, but small effect on the decision to take up coverage. The implied elasticities are very similar to results found in previous studies using very different data. JEL Nos. I11, D12Preliminary and Incomplete â Do Not Cite 1