Job Quality for Non-Standard Workers: Access to Health Insurance, Sick Leave and Retirement Benefits

• In Event: 2161 - Health, Inequality, and the Affordable Care Act

Abstract

Recent studies indicate that almost all new job growth since 1995 has been in the non-standard or contingent work. Many workers in non-standard jobs would prefer full-time jobs with benefits. While unemployment at the national level remains low, the challenges of obtaining health insurance for workers in jobs that are not the “gold” standard remain for many of the roughly 40% of US workers in non-standard jobs. Provisions of the ACA that were enacted in 2014 provided additional pathways to coverage for workers without employer sponsored health insurance. Thus, it is likely that the ACA disproportionately impacted access to insurance for non-standard workers. While some prior research finds broad increases across employment status, our study makes a new contribution by analyzing important groups of non-standard workers. Moreover, by using high quality data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), we are able to examine how non-standard workers insurance status changed in 2015-2016 compared with earlier years of data and we are able to use geocoded MEPS data to include state identifiers in our analysis. We present estimates of coverage in 2015-2016 for non-standard workers in Medicaid expansion and non-expansion states. We also provide estimates of coverage and employer insurance offers by annual household income, race-ethnicity, gender, education and a set of social, demographic and job characteristics in addition to paid leave and retirement benefits. We focus on three groups of non-standard workers: full-time temporary contract workers, freelancers (defined as self-employed with no employees and unincorporated) and part-time workers. Together, these three categories represent the largest shares of non-standard employment in the United States. Our findings shed light on current debates about health policy and labor market insecurity, with serious implications for health status and access to healthcare for both workers and their families.

Authors

• Terceira A. Berdahl, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

• Asako S. Moriya, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality