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Title: An Economic Analysis of Employer Related Health Insurance Coverage and Job Mobility in The United States
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Slade, Eric Phillip |
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An Economic Analysis of Employer Related Health Insurance Coverage and Job Mobility in The United States Ph.D. Dissertation, Brown University, 1997 Cohort(s): NLSY79 Publisher: UMI - University Microfilms, Bell and Howell Information and Learning Keyword(s): Benefits, Insurance; Health Care; Health Reform; Industrial Relations; Labor Economics This dissertation investigates the relationship between access to employer related health insurance coverage and transitions out of existing jobs or into new jobs. That relationship has recently become an important topic for investigation as policy makers consider major reforms to the current system of health insurance coverage distribution in the U.S. Previous authors have pointed to the deterrent to job mobility created by preexisting conditions exclusions in health insurance policies as an important reason for reform, but give no guidance as to whether nationalized insurance would be more or less preferable to alternative piecemeal reforms to the current system, such as a prohibition on preexisting condition exclusions. This dissertation advances previous research in this area by formalizing a model which illustrates the interdependencies between job changes and access to health insurance coverage. Within this framework I examine the implications of alternative reforms for access to health insurance coverage and job mobility. In the analysis the decision to leave a current job depends on one's ability to obtain a new job which offers health insurance coverage. Also, individuals with a high propensity for job changes are less likely to be hired by employers who offer coverage than are low mobility individuals. Models of job mobility and health insurance acquisition are estimated using longitudinal data on 21-35 year olds from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. The estimates of health insurance coverage show that employed individuals who have a history of severe illness or who live in states with high average health care costs are substantially less likely to be in jobs which offer coverage than are individuals who do not have a previous history of serious illness or who live in low cost states. For example, the model predicts that employees with three or more prior illness spells lasting longer than a week are 22 percent less likely to be in jobs that offer coverage than are individuals with no such prior spells. The job mobility estimates show that the existence of health insurance coverage at a current job has no negative effect on job mobility once an individual's propensity to change jobs is added as a control in the job mobility equation. This result together with the health insurance estimates strongly suggest that legislation which guarantees health insurance portability, such as the Kennedy-Kassebaum bill now in Congress, is unlikely to have a significant positive effect on job mobility; it may actually make health insurance coverage less available by increasing the burden on employers who offer health insurance as a fringe benefit, thus decreasing their willingness to do so. |
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Bibliography Citation
Slade, Eric Phillip. An Economic Analysis of Employer Related Health Insurance Coverage and Job Mobility in The United States. Ph.D. Dissertation, Brown University, 1997. |