Recent Trends in Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance Coverage: Are Bad Jobs Getting Worse?

Henry Farber and Helen Levy
Additional contact information
Henry Farber: Princeton University
Helen Levy: University of California Berkeley

No 781, Working Papers from Princeton University, Department of Economics, Industrial Relations Section.

Abstract: We examine whether the decline in the availability of employer-provided health insurance is a phenomenon common to all jobs or is concentrated only on certain jobs. In particular, we investigate the extent to which employers have continued to provide health insurance on what we term core jobs while reducing the availability of health insurance on peripheral jobs. We consider two dimensions on which jobs may be considered peripheral: if they are new (tenure less than one year) or part-time. We consider three outcomes whose product is the health insurance coverage rate: 1) the fraction of worker who are in firms that offer health insurance to at least some workers (the offer rate); 2) the fraction of workers who are eligible for health insurance, conditional on being in a firm where it is offered (the eligibility rate); and 3) the fraction of workers who enroll in health insurance when they are eligible for it (the take up rate). We find that declines in own-employer insurance coverage over the 1988-1997 period are driven primarily by declines in take up for core workers and declines in eligibility for peripheral workers. We also look at trends by workers' education level, and see how much of the decline in is offset by an increase in coverage through a spouse's policy. Our findings are consistent with the view that employers are continuing to make health insurance available to their core long-term, full-time employees but are restricting access to health insurance by their peripheral short-term and part-time employees.

Keywords: employer-sponsored; health; insurance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F30 F31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1998-07
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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