More than 67 percent of Americans under age 65 - or 163.4 million Americans - were covered by an employment-based health plan during 2000 up from 1999, when 66.6 percent of the nonelderly population was covered by an employment-based health plan. The expansion in employment-based health...

With the return of health care cost inflation in 1998, employers once again are examining options to control their cost increases. One emerging alternative that is starting to receive a great deal of attention is a way of designing and financing health benefits often referred to as defined...

"Defined contribution" (DC) health benefits are an emerging alternative that employers are starting to examine for controlling the resurgence of health care cost inflation. While there is no agreed-upon definition of what exactly constitutes DC health benefits, under this strategy, employers...

Financial Accounting Statement No. 106 (FAS 106), approved by the Financial Accounting Standards Board in 1990, required most private companies to significantly alter the way they accounted for their retiree health benefits beginning with fiscal years after Dec. 15, 1992. FAS 106 dramatically...

This paper examines the percentage of employers offering health insurance from 2008-2015 to better understand how health insurance offer rates have been affected by the Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA), the Great Recession of 2007-2009, and the subsequent economic recovery. The data come from...

This paper examines 1996-2015 trends in self-insured health plans among private-sector establishments offering health plans and among their covered workers, with a particular focus on 2013 to 2015, so as to assess whether the Affordable Care Act (ACA) might have affected these trends. The data...

This Issue Brief presents the findings of a study of what employers think and do about providing health benefits for their own workers and what they think about covering the population without health benefits. Most Americans under age 65 received health coverage through employers. Yet, about 16...

A return to double-digit annual growth in health benefit costs is fueling interest in new structures for employment-based health benefits. The basic goal of these structures--whether they are called consumer driven or defined contribution--is to control costs by delegating more direct...

Behind the enthusiasm of policymakers for long-term care (LTC) insurance is the belief that increased ownership of private LTC insurance will reduce the government's future liability for financing the nation's LTC needs, currently projected by the Congressional Budget Office to increase by 2.6...

We present and empirically implement an equilibrium labor market search model where risk averse workers facing medical expenditure shocks are matched with firms making health insurance coverage decisions. Our model delivers a rich set of predictions that can account for a wide variety of...