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August 28, 2008Women's Health Insurance Coverage 1980-2005 |
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From The Commonwealth Fund: In the past two decades, women established a firm foothold in the U.S. labor market, dramatically increasing their chance of obtaining employment-based health insurance. At the same time, changes in Medicaid policy greatly expanded the number of low-income women eligible for public health insurance. Higher health care costs, say the authors, wiped out any gains in access to health insurance that women might have realized through greater participation in the work force and expansions of Medicaid policy. The avenues through which working-age women obtained health insurance remained constant, with employment-based health insurance the largest source of coverage and a smaller percentage of working-age women obtaining health coverage through Medicaid and the private nongroup insurance market. Many states raised the income thresholds for pregnant women and expanded eligibility to include low-income families in which the head of the household was unemployed. Employers responded by shifting their growing health care burden to the work force, in the form of sharp increases in the required annual employee contributions for single and family coverage. These increases, coupled with similar increases in required contributions for family coverage, resulted in sharp declines in the uptake of employment-based insurance. Married women, still more likely than men to choose spousal insurance despite steady increases in full-time employment, were disproportionately affected by rising contributions to employment-based coverage. "As holds true for men, declines in the propensity of workers to obtain coverage, for themselves or their spouses, through employment, has been the major factor leading to declines in coverage since 1980," say the authors.
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