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Author: Katherine Baicker Publisher: ISBN: Category : Employer-sponsored health insurance Languages : en Pages : 44
Book Description
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. 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.
Author: Katherine Baicker Publisher: ISBN: Category : Employer-sponsored health insurance Languages : en Pages : 44
Book Description
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. 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.
Author: United States. Congress. Joint Economic Committee. Republican Staff Publisher: ISBN: Category : Compulsory health insurance Languages : en Pages : 32
Author: Jonathan Gruber Publisher: ISBN: Category : Health insurance Languages : en Pages : 37
Book Description
Low rates of health insurance coverage among the non-employed have motivated consideration of policies to subsidize the purchase of insurance for those who are without a job. But there is little evidence on the extent to which coverage differentials between the employed and the non-employed reflect the effects of job loss or merely different underlying tastes for insurance. If the latter, subsidies may not be successful in increasing the rate of insurance coverage among the non-employed. Furthermore, subsidies which lower the costs of non-employment may increase both the incidence and duration of joblessness. We provide new evidence on these issues by analyzing longitudinal data on 25-54 year-old men over the 1983-1989 period. We have four findings of interest. First, even after modelling differences in underlying tastes for insurance, the likelihood of insurance coverage drops by roughly 20 percentage points following job separation. Second, limited subsidization of the cost of insurance through state laws mandating continued access to employer-provided health insurance for the non-employed increases the likelihood of having insurance while without a job by 6.7 percent. Third, these mandates also increase the number of individuals with spells of non-employment and the total amount of time spent jobless. Finally, at least some of this increased non-employment appears to be spent in productive job search as the availability of continuation coverage is related to significant wage gains among those who separate from their jobs.
Author: Jacob Alex Klerman Publisher: ISBN: Category : Employers' liability Languages : en Pages : 5
Book Description
The proposed Health Security Act provides universal health insurance by extending the current employer-based health insurance financing system. It requires employers to pay approximately 80 percent of the health insurance premium for each of their workers. Experience with other legislation requiring employers to provide benefits to their employees indicates that most of the cost of a mandated benefit is shifted to employees in the form of lower wages. However, for workers without health insurance and with earnings close to the minimum wage, minimum-wage legislation prohibits employers from lowering wages in response to a health insurance mandate. These employers can be expected to respond by cutting employment. Recent evidence from employer reactions to increases in the minimum wage suggests that approximately 100,000 jobs would be lost due to the Health Security Act's employer mandate.
Author: Namrata Uberoi Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages :
Book Description
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) expands current public and private sources of health insurance coverage, while also creating new insurance marketplaces. Employer-sponsored insurance (ESI) will continue to cover 60 percent of Americans under the ACA. Accordingly, changes in employment and employment loss will continue to be primary causes of gaps and transitions in health insurance, and many people may look to the new marketplaces to fill gaps in insurance triggered by unemployment. This dissertation examines the risk of unemployment among workers with ESI, prior to health reform, and studies the nature and timing of health insurance transitions triggered by unemployment.Using the 2004 and 2008 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation, I undertake three related analyses to assess the potential demand for coverage into the marketplaces due to unemployment-related transitions. All analyses are grounded in income categories, corresponding to eligibility for Medicaid and subsidies under the ACA: Furthermore, estimates are placed in the context of different macroeconomic conditions corresponding to timeframes before, during, and after the Great Recession of 2007-2009. The sample is limited to working adults, ages 18-64.Over 2.3 million ESI policyholders and their dependents are at risk of utilizing the health insurance marketplaces or Medicaid for unemployment-related insurance transitions; more than half of these workers will be eligible for subsidies under health reform. Almost 1.1 million ESI policyholders will not be re-employed in time to avoid a three month gap, and are potentially subject to the individual mandate penalty. Older workers are more likely to remain on their former employers' plans post unemployment. While three-fourths, 1.2 million, younger policyholders, ages 26-54, are more likely to be uninsured after losing employment. The majority of individuals who lose employment and ESI are middle income workers. Increased unemployment risk and prevalence of ESI interact to create the highest risk of unemployment-related ESI losses in the middle income group, and will also interact with that group's eligibility for assistance under the ACA. Accordingly, ACA subsidies are well targeted to protect the majority of newly unemployed individuals who lose ESI.
Author: United States. Congress. House. Committee on Education and the Workforce. Subcommittee on Employer-Employee Relations Publisher: ISBN: Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 68
Author: Sarah Robinson Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Fifty percent of the U.S. population gets health insurance through an employer, and roughly half of employers only offer one health plan. There- fore, the choices made by firms about what plan(s) to offer are critical to understanding the health insurance available to workers. This paper focuses on one dimension of the firm's decision: whether to self-fund plans (meaning the firm bears the financial risk of claims itself). I study whether firms use self-funding to avoid complying with mandates to cover specific procedures or providers. Using administrative data on the health plans offered by firms and a difference-in-differences design, I find that new mandates increase rates of self-funding among smaller firms (100-249 employees) by 3.2 percentage points, an increase of 14.5%. The mandates do not appear to affect larger firms (250+ employees), who are more likely to already be self-funded in the pre-period. These results imply that new mandates can lead to long-lasting reductions in the proportion of firms that are bound by any state health insurance regulations, including all previously mandated benefits as well as premium taxes.
Author: Katherine Baicker
Author: Katherine Baicker
Author: Katherine Baicker
Author: United States. Congress. Joint Economic Committee. Republican Staff
Author: Jonathan Gruber
Author: United States. Unemployment Insurance Service
Author: Jacob Alex Klerman
Author: Namrata Uberoi
Author: United States. Congress. House. Committee on Education and the Workforce. Subcommittee on Employer-Employee Relations
Author: Sarah Robinson
Author: Alan B. Krueger