PRESS RELEASE

October 26, 2006
Health Policy Institute of Ohio
614-224-4950

Almost 64% of Ohioans between the ages of 18 and 64 receive health insurance from their employer or a family member’s employer; self employed workers lack insurance at higher rates than unemployed adults

Columbus, OH- The larger the number of employees a firm has, the more likely its employees will have health care coverage, while self-employed workers have an extremely high chance of being uninsured. These are just two of the findings of a new data brief from the Health Policy Institute of Ohio.

The Institute’s analysis of data from the 2004 Ohio Family Health Survey found that a person’s employment status has a large influence on whether that person has health care coverage. Generally, independently or self-employed workers have the highest uninsured rates, with 27.7% of all self-employed workers between the ages of 18 and 64 lacking insurance. This is a higher rate of uninsurance than for adults who are out of work, 23% of whom lack insurance. This difference is largely due to family coverage and government-sponsored insurance such as Medicaid and Medicare.

In this analysis, self-employed or independent workers are defined as a person who is self-employed with no employees working for her or him. In 2004, 6.6% or roughly 288,000 Ohioans were independently employed.

Ohioans who worked in small firms of 2 to 49 employees had the second highest overall uninsured rates (at 17.4%). The best health care coverage rates were associated with larger firms. Firms with at least 1,000 employees had the highest rates of coverage, with only 4.6% of their employees lacking insurance. Overall, 63.5% of all people in the state (or 4,456,000 Ohioans) between the ages of 18 and 64, both working and not working, had health coverage through their own or a family member’s employer. If the employee was covered, 87% of the time the employee’s family was covered.

Other findings include:

• Younger workers, across all firm size categories, experienced higher uninsured rates (17.2%) than middle-aged or older workers (8.0%), which equals 303,000 and 250,000 workers, respectively;
• Minority workers, across all firm sizes, were more likely to be uninsured—17.3% of minority workers were uninsured versus 10.4% of White workers (11.4% of all workers were uninsured);
• Workers who dropped out of high school were much more likely to be uninsured, particularly within smaller firms (less than 50 employees)—37.0% of high school dropouts working for smaller firms were uninsured, compared to 13.4% for dropouts working for larger firms;
• Workers reporting being in poor-to-fair health who worked in smaller firms (< 50 employees) were much more likely to be uninsured (34.8%) than workers in poor to fair health in larger firms (22.8%).
• Workers within Ohio’s 29 Appalachian counties, across all firm sizes, were more likely to be uninsured than in other parts of the state, with 14.0% of all Appalachian workers lacking insurance.

For more information on this data brief, including complete breakdowns of these statistics and more information on the 2004 Ohio Family Health Survey, see http://www.healthpolicyohio.org/publications/firmsize.html.

The Health Policy Institute of Ohio is an independent, nonpartisan organization that forecasts health trends, analyzes key health issues, and communicates current research to Ohio policymakers, legislators, and others. For more information on the Institute, call (614) 224-4950 or go to http://www.healthpolicyohio.org.

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