scholarly journals New Insights on Self-Employment of Older Adults in the United States

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 460-460
Author(s):  
Joelle Abramowitz

Abstract This work examines the nature of self-employment arrangements of older adults in the United States. Many people engage in self-employment - in the 2016 Health and Retirement Study (HRS), 20 percent of respondents working for pay reported being self-employed - yet there exists a dearth of data on these arrangements. This lack of data prevents consideration of important questions relevant to employment, inequality, and policy. Who works in different types of self-employment? What resources facilitate some individuals obtaining higher quality self-employment arrangements? To what extent does the income from different types of arrangements keep people out of poverty? Are different types of arrangements associated with individuals being happier and having more job satisfaction? This work leverages novel restricted-access data collected in the HRS in 2016 on the employer names and locations for individuals reporting self-employment along with respondent narratives on industry and type of work to classify self-employment reports into three entrepreneurial roles (own/run; manage; independent) across 14 different types of work. Using the breadth of information collected in the HRS and linkage to administrative records, this work then presents differences in characteristics, such as demographics, income, wealth, savings, health insurance coverage, home ownership, health status, and expectations of working longer, associated with different classifications of self-employment. Exploring these questions provides unique insights into the changing nature of work and the transition to retirement relevant to policy considerations across the health, insurance, and retirement income dimensions, among others.

2021 ◽  
pp. 107755872110158
Author(s):  
Priyanka Anand ◽  
Dora Gicheva

This article examines how the Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansions affected the sources of health insurance coverage of undergraduate students in the United States. We show that the Affordable Care Act expansions increased the Medicaid coverage of undergraduate students by 5 to 7 percentage points more in expansion states than in nonexpansion states, resulting in 17% of undergraduate students in expansion states being covered by Medicaid postexpansion (up from 9% prior to the expansion). In contrast, the growth in employer and private direct coverage was 1 to 2 percentage points lower postexpansion for students in expansion states compared with nonexpansion states. Our findings demonstrate that policy efforts to expand Medicaid eligibility have been successful in increasing the Medicaid coverage rates for undergraduate students in the United States, but there is evidence of some crowd out after the expansions—that is, some students substituted their private and employer-sponsored coverage for Medicaid.


ILR Review ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 610-627 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas C. Buchmueller ◽  
John Dinardo ◽  
Robert G. Valletta

During the past two decades, union density has declined in the United States and employer provision of health benefits has changed substantially in extent and form. Using individual survey data spanning the years 1983–97 combined with employer survey data for 1993, the authors update and extend previous analyses of private-sector union effects on employer-provided health benefits. They find that the union effect on health insurance coverage rates has fallen somewhat but remains large, due to an increase over time in the union effect on employee “take-up” of offered insurance, and that declining unionization explains 20–35% of the decline in employee health coverage. The increasing union take-up effect is linked to union effects on employees' direct costs for health insurance and the availability of retiree coverage.


1992 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 270-286
Author(s):  
E. Richard Brown

A nearly universal consensus has developed in the United States that the current health care financing system is a failure. The system has been unable to control the continuing rapid rise in health care costs (by far, the highest in the world), and it has been unable to stem the growing population that has no health insurance coverage (at least 36 million people). There is nearly universal political agreement that government must provide health insurance to a far greater share of the population than ever before. The political debate now focuses on whether this expanded government role should supplement the private insurance system with an enlarged public program covering those left out of private insurance coverage, or replace private insurance with a universal government health insurance program covering the entire population.


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