The Incidence of Mandated Health Insurance: Evidence from the Affordable Care Act Dependent Care Mandate / Gopi Shah Goda, Monica Farid, Jay Bhattacharya.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Goda, Gopi Shah.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Farid, Monica.

Bhattacharya, Jay.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w21846.

NBER working paper series no. w21846

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Other Title:

Incidence of Mandated Health Insurance

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2016.

Summary:

The dependent care mandate is one of the most popular provisions of the 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA). This provision requires that employer-based insurance plans cover health care expenditures for workers with children 26 years old or younger. While there has been considerable scholarly and policy interest in the effects of this mandate on health insurance coverage among young adults, there has been little scholarly work measuring the costs and incidence of this mandate and who pays the costs of it. In our empirical work, we exploit the fact that some states had dependent care mandates in years prior to the passage of the ACA. Using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), we find that workers at firms with employer-based coverage - whether or not they have dependent children - experience an annual reduction in wages of approximately $1,200. Our results imply that the marginal costs of mandated employer-based coverage expansions are not entirely borne only by the people whose coverage is expanded by the mandate.

Notes:

Print version record

January 2016.