Trends in Employer-Sponsored Insurance Eligibility and Coverage

Michelle Long, MPH; Matthew Rae, MPH, MPA; Gary Claxon; Anne Jankiewicz; David Rousseau, MPH ; for the Kaiser Family Foundation

The graphics below examine eligibility and coverage trends in employer-sponsored health insurance. Since 2000, the share of workers covered by employers’ health benefits at both offering and non-offering firms has dropped to 56%, with the biggest decrease among employees working for small firms (3-199 workers). Among people younger than 65 years, those with lower incomes continued to be less likely to have coverage from an employer-sponsored health plan, as has been the trend since 1999. In 2015, larger firms were more likely than smaller ones to offer health benefits, as were organizations with more higher-wage employees, fewer lower-wage employees, and fewer workers 26 years or younger. Most large employers offered coverage to spouses and other dependents, while fewer than half of these firms offered coverage to same-sex or opposite-sex domestic partners. Few firms took action in 2015 in response to the Affordable Care Act’s employer mandate, including changing some jobs from part-time to full-time so employees would be eligible for coverage.

Source: Kaiser Family Foundation analysis. Original data and detailed source information are available at http://kff.org/JAMA_5-03-2016.