Health Insurance Coverage and Reemployment Outcomes Among Older Displaced Workers

This paper investigates the relationship between health insurance coverage and employment behavior among older workers with an involuntary job loss. It finds that various sources of health insurance are available to mitigate the circumstances where employer-sponsored health insurance is terminated when older workers lose jobs involuntarily. However, older displaced workers remain less likely to be insured than comparable non-displaced workers by 7.6 percentage points one year after the job loss. The analysis also reveals that having secure health coverage before job displacement is associated with lower probabilities of reemployment and longer post-displacement non-employment spells.