Chivers, D. and Feng, Z. and Villamil, A. (2017) 'Employment-based health insurance and misallocation : implications for the macroeconomy.', Review of economic dynamics., 23 . pp. 125-149.
Abstract
Most working-age Americans obtain health insurance through the workplace. U.S. law requires employers to use a common price, but the value of insurance varies with idiosyncratic health risk. Hence, linking employment and health insurance creates a wedge between the marginal cost and benefit of insurance. We study the impact of this wedge on occupational choice and welfare in a general equilibrium model. Agents face idiosyncratic health expenditure shocks, have heterogeneous managerial and worker productivity, and choose whether to be workers or entrepreneurs. First, we consider a private insurance indemnity policy that removes the link between employment and health insurance, so only ability matters for occupational choice. By construction, this is the most efficient policy. We find a welfare gain of 2.28% from decoupling health insurance and employment. Second, we tighten the link by increasing employment-based health insurance from the current U.S. level of 62% to 100%, and find a welfare loss of – 0.61%.
Item Type: | Article |
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Full text: | (AM) Accepted Manuscript Available under License - Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives. Download PDF (1830Kb) |
Status: | Peer-reviewed |
Publisher Web site: | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.red.2016.09.002 |
Publisher statement: | © 2016 This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ |
Date accepted: | 03 September 2016 |
Date deposited: | 15 March 2017 |
Date of first online publication: | 09 September 2016 |
Date first made open access: | 09 March 2018 |
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