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Author: Kuttner, Hanns ; Baughman, Reagan ; Christian, Michael ; Mortensen, Karoline
Working Paper: Employment and Health Insurance: Views from Five Surveys (PDF) ; September 2004
Abstract:
Five national surveys offer similar accounts of employment-based health insurance and the subset of the uninsured who have declined employment-based health insurance. While offering similar stories, the surveys are far from identical in the number of people they place at each turn in the story, with the relative size of the difference tending to grow as the subset becomes smaller. In disentangling sources of disagreement, we find no survey has an absolute advantage. The advantages are comparative. Thus we see nothing in the differences across the surveys that is likely to disturb the current equilibrium of economists who look at health insurance relying on the Current Population Survey and health services researchers the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey. Nonetheless, this equilibrium leaves unused some of the information that can be had from other surveys, and we close with some of that information. |
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Author: Hirth, Richard ; Baughman, Reagan ; Chernew, Michael ; Shelton, Emily C.
Working Paper: The Prevalence
of Mismatches between Workers' Preferences and
Employers' Insurance Offers (PDF)
; October 2004
Abstract:
To assess the performance of the employment-based
health insurance system, it is necessary to understand
how well workers sort into jobs that offer their
desired mix of cash wages relative to benefits.
However, few studies directly measure the extent
of sorting. We quantify the prevalence of mismatches
between workers' preferences and firms' insurance
offerings, considering two types of mismatch,
1) workers who would desire coverage through
their employer, but work for firms that do not
offer coverage, and 2) workers who do not desire
coverage through their employer, but work for
firms that offer coverage. Most workers (78.1
percent) enjoy labor market matches that appear
consistent with their preferences. The remaining
21.9 percent of workers are mismatched. For most
of these mismatches, the primary consequence
is lower cash earnings or higher insurance premiums
than they would face if they were better matched
in the labor market. However, a minority of the
identified mismatches appear to be "involuntarily
uninsured" workers who would gain insurance
if they were to find a better match. Extrapolating
from the analysis sample, these involuntarily
uninsured workers and their uninsured dependents
may represent more than one in six uninsured
individuals in the United States. |
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