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Re-Estimating Employer Contributions to Health Insurance in the CPS ASEC

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Working Paper Number SEHSD-WP2024-06

Abstract

For data from 1991 to 2017, the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement (CPS ASEC) included modeled values of employer contributions to health insurance based on a statistical match of data collected in 1977 and 1980. Research using different modeling techniques has shown that these estimates undervalued the amount employers contributed to their employee’s health insurance (Janicki, O’Hara and Zawacki 2013; Berchick and O’Hara 2017, Larrimore and Splinter 2018). In this paper, we revisit these methods and extend work by Berchick and O’Hara to estimate employer contributions to health insurance premiums after implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and the redesign of the CPS ASEC. We replicate existing imputation methods, making use of CPS ASEC and Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS-IC) data to compare estimates across more recent survey years. We then extend Berchick and O’Hara (2017) to the present-day CPS ASEC by employing a Bayesian imputation procedure which uses aggregate data from MEPS-IC to estimate employer contributions. The paper outlines the specifics of model selection and data sources, with the goal of producing a reliable measure of employer contributions of health insurance premiums for the annual CPS ASEC release.

Page Last Revised - March 21, 2024
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