Health Insurance, Familial Responsibilities and Job Satisfaction

We observed that workers with health insurance provided by their employers reported lower job satisfaction in survey data. Middle-aged and middle-income workers, particularly those with young children at home, showed the strongest negative relationship between health insurance and job satisfaction. The most plausible explanation is that these workers were in suboptimal labor market situations because of their familial responsibilities to provide health insurance for their family relative to workers who were free to choose a better job match or not work at all. This is confirmed by workers with options to obtain health insurance from a source other than their own jobs, namely those likely eligible for parental insurance, Medicaid, or Medicare, who showed no such negative relationship between health insurance and job satisfaction. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015