Nothing Special   »   [go: up one dir, main page]
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/tpr/amjhec/v2y2016i3p273-299.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Employers’ Changing Economic Incentives to Offer Health Insurance under the Affordable Care Act

Author

Listed:
  • Jean M. Abraham

    (Division of Health Policy and Management, University of Minnesota)

  • Roger Feldman

    (Division of Health Policy and Management, University of Minnesota)

  • Peter Graven

    (Center for Health Systems Effectiveness, Oregon Health and Science University)

Abstract
The employer's decision to offer health insurance depends on how much workers value insurance relative to wages, and that value is likely to vary, given the composition of the establishment's workforce and economic incentives such as the preferential tax treatment of premiums for employer-sponsored insurance (ESI). Using the 2008–10 MEPS Insurance Component augmented with information from other sources, we generate new estimates of employers’ price-sensitivity of offering insurance. Our results suggest that small and medium-size employers are sensitive to changes in the tax price of insurance, with small employers exhibiting the largest price-sensitivity. Workforce composition and local labor market conditions also influence employer offers. With these model estimates, we predict how provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA)—including the employer shared-responsibility requirement, premium tax credits for exchange-based coverage, and the individual mandate—affect the probability of offering ESI. Findings from this study can inform policy discussions about the implications of ACA provisions as well as subsequent reforms focused on the tax-exempt status of ESI premiums.

Suggested Citation

  • Jean M. Abraham & Roger Feldman & Peter Graven, 2016. "Employers’ Changing Economic Incentives to Offer Health Insurance under the Affordable Care Act," American Journal of Health Economics, MIT Press, vol. 2(3), pages 273-299, Summer.
    • Handle: RePEc:tpr:amjhec:v:2:y:2016:i:3:p:273-299
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/AJHE_a_00045
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Coleman Drake & Lucas Higuera & Fernando Alarid-Escudero & Roger Feldman, 2017. "A Kinked Health Insurance Market: Employer-Sponsored Insurance under the Cadillac Tax," American Journal of Health Economics, MIT Press, vol. 3(4), pages 455-476, Fall.
    2. Gloria Sheu & Charles Taragin, 2021. "Simulating mergers in a vertical supply chain with bargaining," RAND Journal of Economics, RAND Corporation, vol. 52(3), pages 596-632, September.
    3. Meiselbach, Mark K. & Abraham, Jean M., 2023. "Do minimum wage laws affect employer-sponsored insurance provision?," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 92(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    employer-sponsored health insurance; employer decision-making; price-sensitivity; Affordable Care Act;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I13 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Health Insurance, Public and Private

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:tpr:amjhec:v:2:y:2016:i:3:p:273-299. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kelly McDougall (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://direct.mit.edu/journals .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.