Employer-sponsored coverage drops by 1.3 million in Ohio

The number of Ohioans who received health insurance through their employers dropped by 1.3 million over the past decade as fewer employers offered insurance and an even greater number of workers declined coverage when it was offered, according to a new state-by-state analysis (Source: “1.3 million Ohioans have lost company-sponsored health coverage,” Dayton Daily News, April 11, 2013). 

The study, which was conduted by University of Minnesota’s State Health Access Data Assistance Center and released by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, found that about 6.2 million Ohioans, or 63.2 percent of the non-elderly population, received health coverage through their job or a family member’s job in 2011, down from 77 percent in 2000.

Ohio, with a 13.7 point drop, saw the fifth largest percentage point drops in employer-sponsored insurance coverage from 2000–2011.

"This is not just a story about employers dropping insurance coverage, or employees not signing up for coverage,” said Julie Sonier, SHADAC’s deputy director .“One of the impacts of declining employer-sponsored insurance is that there is more fiscal pressure on state budgets because you have more people turning to those public sources of coverage or going uninsured.”