Biography: Sherry Glied, an economist, is Dean of the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University. From 2010-2012, Glied served as the Senate-confirmed Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at the Department of Health and Human Services. She served as Senior Economist on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers in 1992-1993, under Presidents Bush and Clinton. In 2016-2017, she served on the Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking. She is currently chairing New York Governor Hochul’s Commission on the Future of Health Care. Glied is a member of the Board of Directors of Geisinger, the Milbank Fund, and the Social Science Research Council. She is a Nonresident Senior Fellow of the Brookings Institution and an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, the National Bureau of Economic Research, the National Academy of Social Insurance, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Who Really Pays for Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance? General Reflections and New Evidence from the ACA Dependent Coverage Mandate
Abstract: The incidence of employer-provided health insurance within firms is important for the design of the tax treatment of employer-based coverage and for understanding the evolving structure of the US labor market. Economic theory and empirical studies conclude that the cost of voluntary employer-sponsored health insurance falls on employees as a group. However, the distribution of overall and subsidy incidence and the mechanism through which incidence occurs have not been well-established.
This talk will provide new evidence (joint with Hansoo Ko) on incidence by examining the dependent coverage mandate in the ACA, which mandates that adult children to age 26 may remain on their parents’ policies. We confirm the overall incidence of the mandate and then consider three situations in which the benefits of this new coverage to an employee differ from the costs to an employer. I will then relate this evidence to the broader empirical literature and policy.