NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH

Employee Costs and the Decline in Health Insurance Coverage

David M. Cutler

NBER Working Paper No. 9036*
Issued in July 2002
NBER Program(s):   HC    PE

The NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health provides summaries of publications like this.  You can sign up to receive the NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health by email.

This paper examines why health insurance coverage fell despite the lengthy economic boom of the 1990s. I show that insurance coverage declined primarily because fewer workers took up coverage when offered it, not because fewer workers were offered insurance or were eligible for it. The reduction in take-up is associated with the increase in employee costs for health insurance. Estimates suggest that increased costs to employees can explain the entire decline in take-up rates in the 1990s.

*Published: This paper was subsequently published as Employee Costs and the Decline in Health Insurance Coverage, David M. Cutler, in NBER book Frontiers in Health Policy Research, Volume 6 (2003)
Cutler, David M. "Employee Costs And The Decline In Health Insurance Coverage," Forum for Health Economics and Policy, 2003, v6, Article 3.

You may purchase this paper on-line in .pdf format from SSRN.com ($5) for electronic delivery.

Information about Free Papers

You should expect a free download if you are a subscriber, a corporate associate of the NBER, a journalist, a site with your domain name in ".GOV", or a resident of nearly any developing country or transition economy.

If you usually get free papers at work/university but do not at home, you can either connect to your work VPN or proxy (if any) or elect to have a link to the paper emailed to your work email address below. The email address must be connected to a subscribing college, university, or other subscribing institution. Gmail and other free email addresses will not have access.

E-mail:

Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX

 
Publications
Activities
Meetings
Data
People
About

National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138; 617-868-3900; email: info@nber.org