Government Mandates and Employer-Based Health Insurance: Who Is Still Not Covered? (original) (raw)
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Mandating Insurance Offers for Low-Wage Workers: An Evaluation of Labor Market Effects
Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, 2003
Employing a simultaneous model of part-time status, health insurance offers, and wages, we examine the impacts on employment and health insurance coverage of nondiscrimination rules in the tax code governing employer-sponsored health insurance. Using 1988 and 1993 Employee Benefits Supplements to the Current Population Surveys and variations in health insurance premiums and minimum wages, we find that health insurance coverage among low-wage primary earners is increased by at most 31 percent by the policy, at a cost of an estimated 0.8 -5.4-percentage-point decrease in full-time employment for low-wage workers.
Government mandates and employer-sponsored health insurance: who is still not covered?
International journal of health care finance and economics, 2002
We characterize employer-sponsored health insurance offering strategies in light of benefit non-discrimination and minimum wage regulation when workers have heterogeneous earnings and partially unobservable demand for (and cost of) insurance. We then empirically examine how earnings and expected medical expenses are associated with low wage workers' ability to obtain insurance before and after enactment of federal benefit non-discrimination rules. We find no evidence that the non-discrimination rules helped low wage workers (especially those with high own or children's expected medical expenses) to obtain insurance.
1997
As of 1978, the favorable tax treatment of fringe benefits, including health insurance, has been regulated via a nondiscrimination clause such that low-wage, full-time workers must be offered health insurance (and other benefits) that are offered to higher-wage workers by the firm. Part-time workers may be excluded from coverage, however, creating incentives for firms to hire some types of workers part time to deny them coverage. We hypothesize that firms will hire fewer workers whose relative costs have increased, ...
Health Services Research, 2013
ObjectiveTo estimate 2012 tax expenditures for employer‐sponsored insurance (ESI) in the United States and to explore the sensitivity of estimates to assumptions regarding the incidence of employer premium contributions.Data SourcesNationally representative Medical Expenditure Panel Survey data from the 2005–2007 Household Component (MEPS‐HC) and the 2009–2010 Insurance Component (MEPS IC).Study DesignWe use MEPS HC workers to construct synthetic workforces for MEPS IC establishments, applying the workers' marginal tax rates to the establishments' insurance premiums to compute the tax subsidy, in aggregate and by establishment characteristics. Simulation enables us to examine the sensitivity of ESI tax subsidy estimates to a range of scenarios for the within‐firm incidence of employer premium contributions when workers have heterogeneous health risks and make heterogeneous plan choices.Principal FindingsWe simulate the total ESI tax subsidy for all active, civilian U.S. work...
Estimates of the Tax Subsidy for Employment-Related Health Insurance
National Tax Journal, 2000
This paper uses the MEDSIM health care microsimulation model developed by researchers at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to compute the magnitude and distribution of the tax subsidy for employment-related health insurance premiums. We also present estimates of the revenue gain that would be associated with a variety of caps on the amount of contributions that can be excluded from the tax base.
LABOR MARKET EFFECTS OF EMPLOYER-PROVIDED HEALTH INSURANCE
Economic Inquiry, 2007
This is an experimental study in economics of mandated benefits. Most individuals who have health insurance in the US obtain it through their employer. Some states either have or are considering government mandates that require employers to provide insurance to all full-time workers. We use an experimental laboratory to investigate possible effects of alternative health insurance regulations on the competitive labor market performance. We find that mandating the insurance for all workers creates labor market distortions; whereas mandating the insurance only for full-time workers leads to a higher coverage then under no mandate, an increased number of part-time workers, but does not necessarily lower market efficiency.
Health Insurance , Minimum Wages and the Labor Market : Insights from an Experiment
2015
We investigate, experimentally, labor market effects of two widely-discussed policy regulations: employer health insurance mandates and minimum wage increases. Using a competitive labor market framework, we verify that a minimum wage, if becomes binding, may eliminate voluntary provision of health insurance by firms to low wage workers. Mandating health insurance for all workers guarantees insurance coverage for those employed, but may lead to unemployment even if the minimum wage alone does not have this effect. Thus the interaction of two policies may result in consequences that may be overlooked if the policies are considered in isolation from each other. JEL classification codes: C92, I18, J20, J3.
Labor Supply Responses to Employer-Provided Health Insurance
2002
Variation in income tax policies and health insurance costs are shown to be theoretically appropriate instruments to identify endogenous firm wage and benefit offers in a labor supply model. Empirical results show that firms are more likely to provide health insurance benefits in states with high marginal income tax rates and low hospitalization costs. The model implies that over the 1983-1995 period, large increases in health insurance costs and reductions in marginal income tax rates lowered the probability of receiving health insurance benefits from employers by 10 percentage points. This decrease in benefits lowered hours of labor supply by 4-7%.
Another Look at the Effect of State Mandates for Health Insurance Benefits
2007
The research question we address is whether state laws that require health insurance policies to provide coverage for specified benefits have affected the size of the population without any private sector health insurance coverage. The laws are often alleged to increase the cost of insurance premiums and thus reduce incentives for smaller employers to offer and for individuals to purchase health insurance. Using data from the United States Census Current Population Survey (CPS) from 1996 to 2002, we measure the effects of 2 sets of high cost benefit mandates on the probability for workers to have health insurance through their employer. We use both individual and state level analyses. Generally we find weak and statistically insignificant effects associated with benefit mandates, though we see evidence that this relationship grows stronger over time. This journal article is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/wharton\_research\_scholars/43 Another Look at the Ef...