IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/jrinsu/v77y2010i1p105-127.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Effects of Offering Health Plan Choice Within Employment‐Based Purchasing Groups

Author

Listed:
  • M. Kate Bundorf

Abstract

Employers may offer employees a choice of health plans either to promote competition among plans or to better cater to employee preferences for different types of products. This article examines whether the relationship between the availability of choice and insurance costs and coverage are consistent with these models of employer behavior. The results indicate that employers who offer choice have lower average premiums, primarily because employees are enrolled in less generous plans, and cover a greater proportion of workers than those who do not. The results are consistent with employers offering choice to accommodate diverse worker preferences.

Suggested Citation

  • M. Kate Bundorf, 2010. "The Effects of Offering Health Plan Choice Within Employment‐Based Purchasing Groups," Journal of Risk & Insurance, The American Risk and Insurance Association, vol. 77(1), pages 105-127, March.
  • Handle: RePEc:bla:jrinsu:v:77:y:2010:i:1:p:105-127
    DOI: 10.1111/j.1539-6975.2009.01338.x
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1539-6975.2009.01338.x
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/j.1539-6975.2009.01338.x?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Feldman, Roger & Dowd, Bryan, 2000. "Risk segmentation: goal or problem?," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 19(4), pages 499-512, July.
    2. Michael Rothschild & Joseph Stiglitz, 1976. "Equilibrium in Competitive Insurance Markets: An Essay on the Economics of Imperfect Information," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 90(4), pages 629-649.
    3. Gruber, Jonathan & Lettau, Michael, 2004. "How elastic is the firm's demand for health insurance?," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 88(7-8), pages 1273-1293, July.
    4. Bradford, W David, 1996. "Efficiency in Employment-Based Health Insurance: The Potential for Supra-marginal Cost Pricing," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 34(2), pages 341-356, April.
    5. Kate Bundorf, M., 2002. "Employee demand for health insurance and employer health plan choices," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 21(1), pages 65-88, January.
    6. White, Halbert, 1980. "A Heteroskedasticity-Consistent Covariance Matrix Estimator and a Direct Test for Heteroskedasticity," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 48(4), pages 817-838, May.
    7. Dranove, David & Spier, Kathryn E. & Baker, Laurence, 2000. "'Competition' among employers offering health insurance," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 19(1), pages 121-140, January.
    8. repec:fth:prinin:398 is not listed on IDEAS
    9. W. David Bradford & Lee Rivers Mobley, 2004. "Employment-Based Health Insurance and the Effectiveness of Intrafirm Competition between Insurance Providers," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 70(4), pages 1012-1031, April.
    10. Summers, Lawrence H, 1989. "Some Simple Economics of Mandated Benefits," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 79(2), pages 177-183, May.
    11. Ellis, Randall P, 1989. "Employee Choice of Health Insurance," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 71(2), pages 215-223, May.
    12. David M. Cutler & Sarah J. Reber, 1998. "Paying for Health Insurance: The Trade-Off between Competition and Adverse Selection," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 113(2), pages 433-466.
    13. Pauly, Mark V. & Herring, Bradley J., 2000. "An efficient employer strategy for dealing with adverse selection in multiple-plan offerings: an MSA example," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 19(4), pages 513-528, July.
    14. Pauly, Mark V, 1986. "Taxation, Health Insurance, and Market Failure in the Medical Economy," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 24(2), pages 629-675, June.
    15. Yu‐Luen Ma & Mark Browne, 2005. "Subsidization and Choice in the Group Health Insurance Market," Journal of Risk & Insurance, The American Risk and Insurance Association, vol. 72(3), pages 413-439, September.
    16. Miller, Nolan H., 2005. "Pricing health benefits: A cost-minimization approach," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 24(5), pages 931-949, September.
    17. Royalty, Anne Beeson, 2008. "Estimating workers' marginal valuation of employer health benefits: Would insured workers prefer more health insurance or higher wages," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 27(1), pages 89-105, January.
    18. Chernew, Michael E. & Frick, Kevin D., 1999. "The impact of managed care on the existence of equilibrium in health insurance markets," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 18(5), pages 571-590, October.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Rahkovsky, Ilya, 2010. "Exclusive contracts in health insurance," MPRA Paper 27473, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    2. Pilny, Adam & Wübker, Ansgar & Ziebarth, Nicolas R., 2017. "Introducing risk adjustment and free health plan choice in employer-based health insurance: Evidence from Germany," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 56(C), pages 330-351.
    3. Ines Läufer, 2014. "Das Krankenversicherungssystem in den USA: Bestimmungsparameter des Angebots und der Ausgestaltungformen von Arbeitgeber-Gruppenversicherungen," Otto-Wolff-Institut Discussion Paper Series 03/2014, Otto-Wolff-Institut für Wirtschaftsordnung, Köln, Deutschland.
    4. Grzegorz Zimon & Vitalina Babenko & Beata Sadowska & Katarzyna Chudy-Laskowska & Blanka Gosik, 2021. "Inventory Management in SMEs Operating in Polish Group Purchasing Organizations during the COVID-19 Pandemic," Risks, MDPI, vol. 9(4), pages 1-16, April.
    5. DeVaro, Jed & Maxwell, Nan L., 2014. "The elusive wage-benefit trade-off: The case of employer-provided health insurance," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 37(C), pages 23-37.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. M. Kate Bundorf, 2003. "The Effects of Offering Health Plan Choice within Employment-Based Purchasing Groups," NBER Working Papers 9996, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Lehrer, Steven F. & Pereira, Nuno Sousa, 2007. "Worker sorting, compensating differentials and health insurance: Evidence from displaced workers," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 26(5), pages 1034-1056, September.
    3. Randall P. Ellis & Juan Gabriel Fernandez, 2013. "Risk Selection, Risk Adjustment and Choice: Concepts and Lessons from the Americas," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 10(11), pages 1-34, October.
    4. Kate Bundorf, M., 2002. "Employee demand for health insurance and employer health plan choices," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 21(1), pages 65-88, January.
    5. Sinaiko, Anna D. & Hirth, Richard A., 2011. "Consumers, health insurance and dominated choices," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 30(2), pages 450-457, March.
    6. Priyanka Anand, 2017. "Health Insurance Costs and Employee Compensation: Evidence from the National Compensation Survey," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 26(12), pages 1601-1616, December.
    7. M. Kate Bundorf & Jonathan Levin & Neale Mahoney, 2012. "Pricing and Welfare in Health Plan Choice," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 102(7), pages 3214-3248, December.
    8. M. Kate Bundorf, 2016. "Consumer-Directed Health Plans: A Review Of The Evidence," Journal of Risk & Insurance, The American Risk and Insurance Association, vol. 83(1), pages 9-41, January.
    9. Ilya Rahkovsky, 2015. "Exclusive Contracts in Health Insurance," Business and Management Research, Business and Management Research, Sciedu Press, vol. 4(2), pages 37-53, June.
    10. Keith J. Crocker & John R. Moran, 2002. "Contracting with Limited Commitment: Evidence from Employment-Based Health Insurance Contracts," Center for Policy Research Working Papers 45, Center for Policy Research, Maxwell School, Syracuse University.
    11. Allen C. Goodman & Miron Stano, 2000. "Hmos and Health Externalities: A Local Public Good Perspective," Public Finance Review, , vol. 28(3), pages 247-269, May.
    12. Monique Kerleau & Anne Fretel & Isabelle Hirtzlin, 2009. "Regulating Private Health Insurance in France : New Challenges for Employer-Based Complementary Health Insurance," Post-Print halshs-00423931, HAL.
    13. Glazer, Jacob & McGuire, Thomas G., 2011. "Gold and Silver health plans: Accommodating demand heterogeneity in managed competition," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 30(5), pages 1011-1019.
    14. Cutler, David M. & Zeckhauser, Richard J., 2000. "The anatomy of health insurance," Handbook of Health Economics, in: A. J. Culyer & J. P. Newhouse (ed.), Handbook of Health Economics, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 11, pages 563-643, Elsevier.
    15. Raj Chetty & Amy Finkelstein, 2012. "Social Insurance: Connecting Theory to Data," NBER Working Papers 18433, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    16. Jean Marie Abraham & William B. Vogt & Martin Gaynor, 2002. "Household Demand for Employer-Based Health Insurance," NBER Working Papers 9144, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    17. Michiel Bijlsma & Jan Boone & Gijsbert Zwart, 2014. "Competition leverage: how the demand side affects optimal risk adjustment," RAND Journal of Economics, RAND Corporation, vol. 45(4), pages 792-815, December.
    18. Gruber, Jonathan & Washington, Ebonya, 2005. "Subsidies to employee health insurance premiums and the health insurance market," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 24(2), pages 253-276, March.
    19. Neale Mahoney & E. Glen Weyl, 2017. "Imperfect Competition in Selection Markets," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 99(4), pages 637-651, July.
    20. Alan C. Monheit & Thomas M. Selden, 2000. "Cross‐subsidization in the market for employment‐related health insurance," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 9(8), pages 699-714, December.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:jrinsu:v:77:y:2010:i:1:p:105-127. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ariaaea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.