Capital Ideas Blog

Health insurance and labor supply: How the ACA could impact the job market

By John H. Cochrane
July 22, 2013

From: Blog

This post originally appeared on The Grumpy Economist.

I just ran across an interesting paper, "Public Health Insurance, Labor Supply, and Employment Lock" by Craig Garthwaite, Tal Gross and my Booth colleague Matthew Notowidigdo.

They study an interesting event

... In 2005, Tennessee discontinued its expansion of TennCare, the state’s Medicaid system. ... Approximately 170,000 adults (roughly 4 percent of the state’s non-elderly, adult population) abruptly lost public health insurance coverage over a three-month period.
The result was
a large and immediate labor supply increase....we find an immediate increase in job search behavior and a steady rise in both employment and health insurance coverage.
They call the phenomenon "employment lock." This is different from "job lock," people with preexisting conditions who stay with jobs they didn't want in order to keep health insurance. "Employment lock" is the choice by healthy people to work at all in order to get insurance, or put in academic prose, "strong work disincentives from public health insurance that are unrelated to strict income-based eligibility limits."

The converse is a new danger for the ACA
Additionally, our estimates may provide useful guidance regarding the likely labor supply impacts of the ACA...

If such individuals could instead acquire affordable health insurance apart from their employer, many of them would exit the labor force entirely. As a result of employment lock, policies that expand access to health insurance apart from employers (such as the ACA) may have large labor market effects...

Using CPS data, we estimate that between 840,000 and 1.5 million childless adults in the US currently earn less than 200 percent of the poverty line, have employer-provided insurance, and are not eligible for public health insurance. Applying our labor supply estimates directly to this population, we predict a decline in employment of between 530,000 and 940,000 in response to this group of individuals being made newly eligible for free or heavily subsidized health insurance.
They are quick to point out that this is not necessarily a bad thing. "The effects do not necessarily imply a welfare loss for individuals choosing to leave the labor force after receiving access to non-employer provided health insurance." If people only work at a job they hate in order to get health insurance, then people may be better off not working. The policy world often just assumes more employment is always a great thing, which isn't true.

However, less employment is not necessarily a good thing either. These are childless adults. How are they supporting themselves if they don't work? Can it possibly be optimal for them to just sit around the house? We surely don't want to compare employer-provided health insurance with highly subsidized individual insurance for the unemployed—that's a subsidy to leisure and obviously skewing the scales.

Most of all, low-income single people face extraordinarily high marginal tax rates and other disincentives to work. So, an artificial incentive to work in order to get health insurance may offset some of the otherwise irresistible incentives not to work. (A good calculation for Casey Mulligan!)

And whether the people are in the end better off working or staying home and receiving larger subsidies, the government and taxpayers are clearly worse off, as the people and their employers are not paying taxes any more.

In sum, academic caution aside, inducing a million childless adults to leave legal employment doesn't look like a good thing to me.  

The evidence is pretty cool. Here are some pictures lifted from the paper.

Quarterly Medicaid Enrollment in Tennessee, Share Employed By Month, LAUS, Searches on Google in Tennessee for Word "TennCare," Searches on Google for Phrase "Job Openings."


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