TY  - JOUR
AU  - Krueger,Alan B.
AU  - Levy,Helen
TI  - Accounting for the Slowdown in Employer Health Care Costs
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 5891
PY  - 1997
Y2  - January 1997
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w5891
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w5891.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Alan B. Krueger
Industrial Relations Section
Firestone Library
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08544
Tel: 609/258-4046
Fax: 609/258-2907
E-Mail: akrueger@princeton.edu

Helen G. Levy
University of Michigan
Institute for Social Research - MI SQ 4119
426 Thompson St.
Ann Arbor, MI 48104 - 1248
Tel: 734/936 4506
Fax: 734/647 1186
E-Mail: hlevy@umich.edu
M2  - featured in NBER digest on 1997-06-01
AB  - The most widely used measure of employer health care costs, the health insurance component of the Employment Cost Index, indicates that cost growth has decelerated since 1989.  In recent years employer expenditures per hour worked have even declined in nominal dollars.  This paper analyzes the components of changes in employers' health care costs over the 1992-94 and 1987-93 periods.  We find that employer costs have decreased primarily as a result of a steady decrease in the fraction of workers with coverage and a large decrease in the rate of growth of insurance premiums.  We conclude that the shift to managed care does not appear to be directly responsible for significant cost savings because managed care premiums are almost as high as those for fee-for-service plans, on average.  Finally, we note that there is a significant need for improved data collection in this area.
ER  -