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Title: Effect of Employer-Provided Health Insurance on Job Mobility: Job-Lock or Job-Push?
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Anderson, Patricia M.
Effect of Employer-Provided Health Insurance on Job Mobility: Job-Lock or Job-Push?
Working Paper, Department of Economics, Dartmouth College and NBER, October 1998
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
Keyword(s): Benefits, Insurance; Census of Population; Health Care; Insurance, Health; Job Rewards; Job Satisfaction; Job Turnover; Labor Market Outcomes; Mobility, Job; Work Attachment

According to Census Bureau figures, 61.4 percent of all Americans were covered by employment-based health insurance coverage in 1997. This unique link between one's job and one's medical coverage has continually raised concerns over both the numbers of uninsured and the possible impact of this linkage on labor market outcomes. For example, much attention has been paid in recent years to the problem of job-lock, in which workers feel trapped in their current jobs because of fear of losing their current health insurance, given that workers who become unemployed or change jobs often spend a period without health insurance. Among those having one or more job interruption between 1993 and 1996, 44 percent went 1 month or more uncovered, compared to just 85 percent for those working full time for the entire 36 month period. At the same time, another potential impact of health insurance on mobility has received much less attention than job-lock, but is the mirror image of that problem. Rather than being locked into a job that, absent the link between employer and health insurance, a worker would leave, a worker in need of coverage may be pushed out of a job in which they would otherwise remain. I term this phenomenon "job-push" to parallel the job-lock terminology. Properly attributing the difference in job mobility induced by employer-provided health insurance to job lock or job-push has important policy implications, because policy reforms directed at job-lock may have no effect on job-push, and may possibly even worsen the problems.
Bibliography Citation
Anderson, Patricia M. "Effect of Employer-Provided Health Insurance on Job Mobility: Job-Lock or Job-Push?" Working Paper, Department of Economics, Dartmouth College and NBER, October 1998.