HEALTH INSURANCE REFORM, OLDER WORKERS, AND RETIREMENT

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The goal of the proposed research is to model the effect of alternative health insurance reforms on older workers and retirees before they become eligible for Medicare. I plan to estimate how different reforms will affect the retirement decisions of workers, the employment and compensation decisions of firms, and the extent of health insurance coverage among the pre-Medicare population. More specifically, the project has four aims: 1) To determine how employer provision of health insurance to retirees affects retirement decisions, to compare this effect to those of social security and firm pension plans, and to assess the interaction of insurance coverage with individual health status in determining retirement. 2) To estimate the effect of policies which subsidize the price of health insurance on the extent of coverage of older workers and early retirees. 3) To determine the effects of mandated employer provision of health insurance on the employment and compensation of older workers, who cost more than their younger counterparts to insure. 4) To use these findings to model the effect of different insurance reforms on retirement decisions and the well being of older workers and early retirees. Although the analysis described below will focus on a limited number of reform proposals, the framework which I establish will be general enough to encompass analysis of the effects of most future reforms. I will use a variety of data sources, including the most comprehensive data set ever collected for older workers and early retirees. A key feature of my analysis will be the use of "natural experiment" identification strategies, which exploit the variation from existing policy differences to analyze future policy changes, allowing me to circumvent the problems of past researchers in isolating the causal effects of the economic variables of interest.