Briefing Paper April 2001

Pennsylvania Child Care Workers Face Health Insurance Crisis

By
David H. Bradley
and Stephen A. Herzenberg

It is widely suspected that few child care workers obtain health benefits through their job and that this contributes to high rates of turnover that undermine the quality of early childhood education.

To date, however, no definitive data exists on the extent to which child care workers do, in fact, obtain health benefits from their employer. This report uses the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' Current Population Survey to fill this information gap for Pennsylvania and for the United States.

• Sixty percent of Pennsylvania workers obtain health insurance through their employer, but only 25 percent of Pennsylvania workers in the child care industry do. Only one in 16 Pennsylvania child care workers obtains family health insurance through their job compared with on in three for all workers.
• Twenty-five percent of Pennsylvania child care industry workers have no health insurance at all, compared with 11 percent of all Pennsylvania workers.
• Across all industries, a smaller share of Pennsylvania than U.S. workers lacks health insurance; but a higher share of Pennsylvania than U.S. child care workers lacks health insurance.
• Although the overall Pennsylvania health insurance picture has improved since 1993-95, the share of Pennsylvania child care workers without health insurance has risen from 21 to 25 percent.
• Even when child care workers obtain employer-provided health insurance, the level of employer contributions is only a little over half of the average employer contribution for all employed Pennsylvania workers- $1,681 versus $3,129.
• The number of uninsured child care workers would be even higher except for the fact that 42 percent of Pennsylvania workers in child care obtain health insurance as a dependent on someone else's plan (e.g., a spouse).
• Health insurance is especially critical to child care workers because of the risk of disease and injury on the job and because their health problems may put children at risk.

To help fill the health insurance gap for child care workers, Pennsylvania should:

• Use tobacco settlement dollars to expand health insurance for all low-income adults, enabling more child care workers to afford a basic health care package; and
• Establish a subsidized purchasing pool that enables child care employers (and possibly other human service providers) to obtain better deals from health insurance companies.

This document is an on-line summary of a Keystone Research Center report. The entire report is available for download as a PDF file at the KRC Web site www.keystoneresearch.org © 2001 Keystone Research Center