Job-Based Coverage Continues Slide

In California, the reforms of the Affordable Care Act may have arrived just in time to save workers who have been losing their employer-based healthcare coverage in record numbers.

That's the conclusion of the UCLA researchers, who in the latest “State of Health Insurance in California” report detected a continued erosion in work-based healthcare benefits. 

The report, based on 2012 data, concluded that only 63.6% of full-time workers were offered health insurance benefits by their employer, down from 66.5% just three years prior. And less than half of Californians – 49.1% – had job-based coverage for all of 2012.

Only 39.6% of part-time workers had health insurance coverage, down from 41.8% in 2009.

“Sadly, health insurance is no longer a guarantee provided by many employers. Healthcare reform (has) filled a huge and growing gap in job-based insurance,” said Shana Alex Charles, lead author of the study and director of the Health Insurance Program at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. 

About 1.8 million Californians held privately-purchased coverage in 2012, a sum that skyrocketed last year with the reforms of the ACA. 

The researchers blame the loss of job-based coverage in part to the Great Recession, which began in late 2007 but led to huge job losses beginning in late 2008 and continuing well into 2009.

While many people returned to work by the end of 2012, the jobs that returned did not necessarily bring health insurance benefits along with them,” the study concluded.

The gap in job-based health insurance coverage was particularly acute among minority groups. Only 33.9% of Latinos had job-based coverage for all of 2012, compared to 63.3% of whites. Among African-Americans, 41.9% had job-based coverage for the entire year.

For all Californians under the age of 65, 21.3%, or 6.91 million, were uninsured for part of 2012, while 13.1%, or 4.3 million, were uninsured for the entire year. 

Among Californians who were uninsured all of the year, every age group between 27 and 64 saw their rates of uninsured rise between 2009 and 2012.

A total of 47.4% of the uninsured resided in households where at least one family member had full-time employment, according to the study.