Health Insurance and Labor Markets: Concepts, Open Questions, and Data Needs

Abstract

This paper reviews the recent economic research on the relationship between health insurance and labor markets in the United States, with an emphasis on research that has emerged since existing major reviews and the aim of identifying the types of data that are needed for this research to progress. We focus on the conceptual and empirical challenges that researchers face in studying these relationships, the data that have allowed this research to proceed, policy-relevant questions that need further study, and the types of data that would help in obtaining better answers to these questions.The vast majority of nonelderly Americans with private health insurance (92%) obtain it through their employer or the employer of a family member.1 For this reason, the labor market and the insurance market are intertwined, raising a number of policy concerns. For example, 18% of nonelderly Americans were uninsured in 2006.2 Most of the uninsured (71%) live in families with at least one full-time worker, and another 11% live in families with one or more part-time workers.