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Saturday, January 21, 2006

The Decline in Workplace Provided Health Coverage

This is from Table 132 of this report from the CDC web site. It's a graph of the percentage of people with workplace provided private health coverage from 1984-2003. There's quite a bit of detail in the table including breakdowns of coverage by age, sex, race, and income level. For example, here's coverage by age:

The numerical overall changes by age are:

Age

1984 2003 Change
Under 18 years 66.5 58.6 -7.9
18-44 years 69.6 62.2 -7.4
45-64 years 71.8 70.0 -1.8

Thus, the largest decline is for those under 45.

Here are the numerical endpoint data by sex along with the overall changes. Given the standard errors in the table (not shown here), there is little difference between males and females:

Sex

1984 2003 Change
Male 69.8 63.3 -6.5
Female 68.4 63.3 -5.1

There are, however, big differences by income level, and the changes are larger for those under 18. As the following table shows, the decline in workplace provided health care coverage has been largest among those earning between 100% and 200% of the poverty level, a change of over 20%, while the change for those outside this range is less than 10%:

Age and Percent of Poverty Level

All ages 1984 2003 Change
  Below 100 % 24.1 19.9 -4.2
  100-149 % 52.4 31.8 -20.6
  150-199 % 69.5 46.8 -22.7
  200 % or more 85.0 78.6 -6.4
Under 18 years
  Below 100 % 23.0 14.0 -9.0
  100-149 % 58.3 30.1 -28.2
  150-199 % 75.8 47.0 -28.8
  200 % or more 86.9 79.9 -7.0

These data show that middle income families have been affected most by the decline in employer provided private health care coverage.

Update: A colleague writes to tell me:

The explanation for the decline in coverage (at least through the late 90s) is also quite interesting.  David Cutler has a paper (NBER WP #9036), arguing that the reason for the decline was not a decrease in employers offering HI, but a decrease in employees choosing to purchase insurance from their employers, primarily due to rising premiums.

    Posted by on Saturday, January 21, 2006 at 01:02 AM in Economics, Health Care | Permalink  TrackBack (0)  Comments (15)

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