'Non-standard' workers found lacking health insurance

WASHINGTON - Four of every five part-time workers in the United States lack employer-sponsored health insurance, a study released Thursday reports.

By comparison, about one of every four full-time employees goes without such insurance, according to the study conducted by the Iowa Policy Project, a nonprofit public policy research group in Mount Vernon, Iowa.



The study analyzed coverage for "non-standard" employees, such as part-time, temporary or contract workers.



About 34.3 million Americans, or 25 percent of the nation's work force, fall into that category, according to the study.



The research "demonstrates the weakness in our health insurance system" for a "vulnerable group of workers," said Sara Collins, a senior program officer with the Commonwealth Fund, a New York nonprofit group that financed the research.



The study, based on 2001 census data and telephone surveys by the researchers in 2003 and 2004, found 21 percent of non-standard employees had health insurance through their jobs, compared with 74 percent of full-time workers.



About 15 percent of the children and 16 percent of the wives of non-standard employees received health insurance through the worker's employer, the study found.



"It's a problem if you're a part-time employee who can't get full-time coverage because your paycheck won't cover it," said Kate Sullivan Hare, executive director of health care policy for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington.



"We need to have a private health-care insurance market that can cover these people," Sullivan Hare said in an interview.



Rising costs have made employers "less and less likely" to subsidize all workers' health insurance, she said. A study released in October by benefits consulting firm Hewitt Associates predicted U.S. companies will pay an average 9.9 percent more for workers' health insurance next year.



Some companies employ part-time workers to avoid paying for health insurance, Kathleen Stoll, director of health policy for Families USA, a Washington-based group that lobbies for "affordable" health care, said in an interview.



The study also found non-standard workers use government insurance, including Medicare and Medicaid, at five times the rate of regular workers. Non-standard workers rely on the government because they have fewer options, the Commonwealth Fund's Collins said.



Reductions in employer-based coverage "has been a growing trend" since the 1970s, said Peter Fisher, research director for the Iowa Policy Project and one of the study's authors. Employment-based health insurance today covers 60 percent of the U.S. population, down from 70 percent in the mid-1970s, according to research cited by the study.



Fisher and the two other authors of the study, Elaine Ditsler and Colin Gordon, encourage labor law changes that would give non-standard workers the same status as full-time employees. Still, policy makers must be "wary of mandating coverage for very low-wage workers" when employees can't bear the cost, the study says.



The Iowa Policy Project's telephone survey of non-standard workers consisted of 20-minute telephone interviews among a random sample of workers over 18 years old.



Margins of error were 1.5 percentage points for the survey and less than 1 percentage point for the analysis based on Census Bureau data.