Stability and Variation in Employment-Based Health Insurance Coverage, 1993-1997

A rapidly expanding body of recent literature has chronicled the erosion of employment-based health insurance coverage over the past decade. In contrast, using two large employer health insurance surveys, this article finds overall stability in rates of workers participating in insurance and in their electing family coverage between 1993 and1997. Underlying this aggregate stability, however, there remains substantial variability in the circumstances facing individual employees. Notably, their access to health insurance is affected by individual employers' decisions to drop coverage, especially among small employers who experience the greatest changes in premiums from year to year.