This article reports on the pension plan participation rate of full-time private wage and salary workers. Data are from a May 1979 Bureau of the Census survey on the pension plan coverage and vesting status of employed workers. The survey results indicate that about half of all full-time private sector workers were covered by a pension plan, with male employees having a 55-percent coverage rate...

Race, Ethnicity and the Dynamics of Health Insurance Coverage Using matched data from the 1996 to 2004 Current Population Survey (CPS), we examine racial patterns in annual transitions into and out of health insurance coverage. We first decompose racial differences in static health insurance coverage rates into group differences in transition rates into and out of health insurance coverage. The...

The Commonwealth Fund Survey of Older Adults reveals that adults ages 50 to 70 who rely on the individual insurance market for health coverage pay much higher premiums than their counterparts with employer coverage or Medicare. The survey found that in 2004, more than half (54%) of older adults with individual coverage spent $3,600 or more annually on premiums. A quarter (26%) spent $6,000 or m...

Outpatient prescription drugs are not a covered benefit under Medicare. There have been proposals in the past to expand Medicare benefits to include drug coverage, and current discussions dealing with "modernizing" the Medicare benefit package have raised the issue again. Using data from the 1995 Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS), we describe the sources and extent of drug coverage amo...

As the U.S. economic downturn continues and job losses mount, more working Americans are likely to lose access to affordable health benefits subsidized by their employers. Analysis of the 2007 Commonwealth Fund Biennial Health Insurance Survey finds that two of three working adults would be eligible to extend job-based coverage, under the 1985 Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COB...

Rapidly rising health insurance costs continue to strain the budgets of U.S. families and employers. This issue brief analyzes changes in private employer-based health premiums and deductibles for all states from 2003 to 2010, and finds total premiums for family coverage increased 50 percent across states and employee annual share of premiums increased by 63 percent over these seven years. At t...

INTRODUCTION Knowledge of inter-district variations in immunisation coverage and the reasons for their existence is of utmost importance in a region in which variations in the socioeconomic factors are known to have a marked influence on immunisation coverage. METHODS This study was based on a sample of 1,279 children aged 12-35 months. Data was obtained from the District Level Household Surv...

Lack of insurance is not solely an issue for the poor. In both California and the nation, approximately 40 percent of the uninsured have family incomes of at least twice the federal poverty level, and one-quarter have family incomes of at least 300 percent of poverty. Examining the issue from this perspective does not detract from the importance of ensuring that those with the least means in ou...

The strong link between health insurance and employment in the United States may cause workers to delay retirement until they become eligible for Medicare at age 65. However, some employers extend health insurance benefits to their retirees, and individuals who are eligible for such retiree health benefits need not wait until age 65 to retire with group health coverage. We investigate the impac...

Under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Medicare coverage expanded in 2011 to fully cover annual preventive care visits. We assessed the impact of coverage expansion, using 2007-13 data from primary care patients of Medicare-eligible age at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation (204,388 patient-years), which serves people in four counties near San Francisco, California. We compared trends in preventive...