The number of uninsured Americans fell in 2000 for the second consecutive year. The reduction has been attributed to the continued expansion of employer-sponsored insurance. However, the increase in employer coverage among adults was offset by declines of other types of coverage. For children, increases in public coverage plus the growth in employer-sponsored insurance led to the reduction in t...

Varied as they may be, most U.S. readers of the Journal probably share at least one thing: employersponsored health insurance is vital to their wellbeing. For their part, most physicians, regardless of their field of medicine or where they practice, depend heavily on employer-sponsored insurance for their paychecks. Since increasing numbers of physicians today are employees of health care organ...

This paper reviews the economic implications of employer and individual health insurance mandates. Although the cost of meeting an employer mandate is nominally paid by employers, in the long run much of the cost may be shifted backward to employees in the form of lower wages. We also compare the consequences of hypothetical employer and individual health insurance mandates for families with di...

Prior research indicates that rural workers are less likely to obtain health insurance coverage through their employer, however, the reasons for this rural-urban differential in coverage rates are not well understood. Differences in coverage may stem from differences in the proportion of workers offered the chance to participate in an employer plan or to differences in the proportion of workers...

Most working-age Americans obtain health insurance coverage through the workplace. U.S. law requires employers that offer health plans to use a price common to all in the group, but the value of insurance to each risk-averse individual varies with their idiosyncratic health risk. Hence, linking employment and health insurance creates a wedge between the marginal cost and benefit of insurance. S...

The number of Americans without health insurance rose from 38.4 million in 2000 to 47.0 million in 2006, primarily due to the precipitous decline in employer-provided health coverage for workers and their families. Nearly 3.9 million fewer Americans under 65 had employer-provided coverage in 2006 than in 2000. The downward trend in the rate of employer-provided insurance continued for the sixth...

Establishing the existence of equilibrium in insurance markets has always been a challenging task for economists due to imperfect information. As illustrated by Rothschild and Stiglitz (1976), imperfect information may lead to complete market failure. This paper extends the standard model of adverse selection by introducing employers that choose the set of policies that are offered to consumers...