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Health Insecurity Now a Broadly Shared American Experience |
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From Economic Policy Institute: Though a majority of workers and their families are still covered through employers, a variety of factors, most prominently increased costs, have led to a steady slide in coverage. This decline has occurred in good economic times and bad, implying a structural, as opposed to cyclical, shift. For example, though the current business cycle has been both highly productive and profitable, the share of workers nationwide with employer-provided health insurance (EPHI) from their own job fell each year, from 51.1% in 2000 to 48.8% in 2006---a decline of 2.3 percentage points. This section uses a common decomposition technique to answer the question posed above: which is a more important determinant of changes in EPHI, the shifts occurring in the structure of employment by industry and occupation, or the changes in coverage within jobs? Appendix Table A4 provides the same analysis for those workers more closely attached to the job market (see above selection criteria). As noted, for these workers, improvements over the latter 1990s were less impressive than those of all workers, and their losses in the 2000s were steeper. Another important finding is that the decline in coverage within jobs is as likely in white-collar occupations, including executives, managers, and workers in professional specialties, as in blue-collar occupations. While these white-collar occupations have relatively high levels of coverage, they saw large declines over this period, demonstrating that even jobs near the top of the occupational ladder are vulnerable to the erosion of the employer-based system. Health Care for America: A Proposal for Guaranteed, Affordable Health Care for All Americans Building on Medicare and Employment-Based Insurance.
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