Research group studies tough health insurance questions

As employers puzzle over the costs and consequences of providing health insurance to their workers, and potential employees sift through the relative value of insurance benefits, government policy makers are pondering the viability and desirability of implementing universal national health care.

Enter the Economic Research Initiative on the Uninsured (ERIU), a U-M-based research consortium that shines a focused beam of academic research on the sometimes convoluted questions surrounding health insurance.

"ERIU in general has its mandate to look at the interaction between labor markets and health insurance, how consumers make choices, how employers make choices, how economic situations affect change and affect the prevalence of insurance," explains Catherine McLaughlin, professor of health management and policy and ERIU director.

The group's annual conference, titled "Coverage Dynamics and the Uninsured," was held July 12-15 at the Business School. It assembled scholars from universities across the nation to present results from a variety of research projects. One paper, co-authored by MIT's Jonathan Gruber and Ebonya Washington, dissected attitudes and behaviors of employees of the U.S. Postal Service when offered premium subsidies.

ERIU seeks to understand issues that relate to those who are unemployed and uninsured, for whom an employer-sponsored health insurance benefit plays a critical role in the job-sorting process as they attempt to re-enter the workforce. For employers as well as government policy-makers, the information provided by ERIU-funded research offers can be invaluable.

McLaughlin says, "It's not until we understand the role that lack of coverage plays in individual decision-making and lifestyles in this country that we then make policy decisions. You shouldn't be recommending policy in the absence of understanding the underlying causes. We're contributing to what we do best, which is solid research that addresses a really critical piece of the puzzle, and it's going to provide an important answer to putting the puzzle together."

Funded by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, ERIU is in partnership with the School of Public Health, the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, the Economics Department and the Institute for Social Research. It is slated to remain active until Dec. 31, 2004.

For more information on ERIU and its research, visit http://www.umich.edu/~eriu/.

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