Obesity and Employer-Provided Health Insurance

The rising prevalence of obesity may represent a substantial drain on employer-provided health care benefits. This study addresses whether obesity status affects a probability of employees’obtaining jobs that offer health insurance. Using two sub-samples (household heads and individuals who never married) from the 2003 wave of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), we analyze men and women separately. We use a logit model to analyze the effect of workers’obesity status on the chance of having employer-provided health insurance and then utilize a non-linear decomposition technique that uses estimated coefficients from a sample of the non-obese to simulate the distribution of the obese employees. We find consistent results for the subsample of household heads and never married workers: obesity is negatively related to the prevalence of insurance for women, but not for men. Utilizing decomposition technique, we find that obesity sorts females into jobs that tend not to provide employment-based health insurance; however, no significant job-sorting effect of obesity for males is found.