TY - JOUR AU - Currie,Janet AU - Yelowitz,Aaron TI - Health Insurance and Less Skilled Workers JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 7291 PY - 1999 Y2 - August 1999 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w7291 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w7291.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Janet Currie Princeton University 316 Wallace Hall Princeton, NJ 08544 Tel: 609-258-7393 Fax: 609-258-5974 E-Mail: jcurrie@princeton.edu Aaron Yelowitz University of Kentucky Department of Economics 335 Business and Economics Building Lexington, KY 40506-0034 Tel: 859/257-7634 Fax: 859/323-1920 E-Mail: aaron@uky.edu AB - We begin this research with the belief that low and declining levels of private-employer sponsored health insurance were a continuing problem, especially among less skilled workers. Our analysis, however, paints a more complex picture. Using data from the March CPS, the SIP, and CPS benefits surveys, we find that while many less skilled workers remain uncovered, the decline in private employer-sponsored health insurance coverage has slowed recently and may even have reversed. Neither crowdout nor a deterioration in the quality of jobs available to the less skilled seems likely to fully explain these time-series trends in health insurance coverage. A simple explanation that has been largely overlooked is that rising health care costs have driven much of the reduction in private insurance coverage, but it is more difficult to test this hypothesis given the available data. ER -