Tracking Health Insurance Coverage by Month : Trends in Employment-Based Coverage Among Workers, and Access to Coverage Among Uninsured Workers

This paper examines employment-based health benefit coverage rates on a monthly basis from December 1995 to March 2009, to allow for more accurate identification of changes in trends, and to more clearly show the effects of recessions and unemployment on changes in coverage. Between December 2007-May 2008, the percentage of workers with coverage in their own name fell from 60.4 percent to 56.8 percent. The recession officially started in December 2007. The period between May 2008-March 2009 shows a continuing decline in the percentage of workers with employment-based coverage in their own name, falling to 55.7 percent by March 2009. Unlike the December 2007-December 2009 period, which saw a drop in employment-based coverage, the recession of 2001 produced very little change in coverage. The likelihood of a worker being uninsured is tied to the strength of the economy and the unemployment rate, but uninsured workers reported multiple reasons for not having coverage. Most workers reported that they did not have coverage because of cost, and those doing so ranged from 70 percent to 90 percent over the December 1995-March 2009 period. The percentage of uninsured workers reporting that they were not offered employment-based health benefits was roughly 40 percent through 2003, and has been falling since then, reaching 24 percent in early 2009. Although the link between health insurance coverage and employment has long been known, these data underscore the degree to which employment (or, more significantly, unemployment) rates directly affect the levels of the uninsured in the United States. The PDF for the above title, published in the March 2010 issue of EBRI Notes, also contains the fulltext of another March 2010 EBRI Notes article abstracted on SSRN: “Employment Status of Workers Ages 55 or Older, 1987-2008.”